I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us
Alice HoffmanRead
The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep,those haunted by one thing or another:love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the loneliness and heartache experienced by those in the darkness of night, consumed by their troubled love lives.
Alice Hoffman's quote explores the emotional struggles of individuals who find themselves awake during the night, unable to escape their feelings of sorrow and despair related to love. It highlights the profound impact of lost or unfulfilled love, showcasing how these haunting emotions drive people to seek solitude in the shadows, away from the world.
Themes
LoveDespairLonelinessHeartbreakNight
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote during a discussion about the emotional struggles of unrequited love.
More from Alice Hoffman
All quotes →Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hands over hers on the countertop, then hooped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot. 'I just wanted to wake you up', he said. Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever had been before was all over.
Alice HoffmanRead
Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
Alice HoffmanRead
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself
Alice HoffmanRead
My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.
Alice HoffmanRead
My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.
Alice HoffmanRead
Similar quotes
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan DidionRead
People who are alone all the time never grow. Those hermits just stay the same. It's only through relationships. Relationships change us and make us grow.
Viola DavisRead
No man is born believing that he has dominion over women. Instead, this view is handed down from generation to generation and amplified through social custom, culture, and popular media.
Cyril RamaphosaRead
And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.
Andr AcimanRead
I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.
Alice WalkerRead
Our bodies aren't strangers,' he said, his voice ragged. 'Our spirits aren't strangers'. He held her face in his hands. 'Tell me what part of me is stranger to you and I'll destroy that part of me.' And she wept to hear his words.
Melina MarchettaRead