Explore Quotes by Alice Hoffman

He has the ability to catch someone by the way that he looks at her, and make her wish he would go on looking.

What men yearn for they often destroy.

The frightened walk away when love is difficult. I know that now. You have to be willing to give everything away. You have to be willing to end up with nothing. Only then will your heart be whole.

She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.

The nature of love had totally escaped her until now. She had thought that if you lost it, you could never get it back, like a stone thrown down a well. But it was like the water at the bottom of the well, there when you can't even see it, shifting in the dark.

People want to ignore what they can't understand. They're looking for logic at any cost.

She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene.

You don't fight for peace sister,' Nahara told me, 'You embrace it.

Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.

Any weapon touched by a woman, even by accident, must be cleansed with both water and prayer so that her essence would not linger, diverting the warrior who might use it next, for even the faintest touch could bring lust to that man's heart. Perhaps that meant a woman who was well trained in arms would be the superior warrior, her attention never wavering from her task.

He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.

At midnight the wind in the tress can sound like the ocean. The moonlight can make a road appear as endless as the sea.

Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Wear dark glasses; bathe with lavender oil and cool fresh water. Seek shelter from the sun at noon.

Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.

Love was like that, like a dream you didn't quite understand, one in which you didn't necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you.

I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.