Quotes by Alice Hoffman

“Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.”

“I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.”

“... the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.”

“... a man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.”

“There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.”

“There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and so...”

“She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.”

“Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.”

“He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he inte...”

“People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.”

“Helplessness and anger make for predictable behavior: Children are certain to shove each other and pull hair, teenagers will call each other names and cry, and grown women who are sisters will say ...”

“I could hardly get a boy to look at me. All right, they'd look, they'd even take me out, but no one asked for a second date. I was too nasty, a real wise guy, and all the boys could tell what my ro...”

“I once believed that life was a gift. I thought whatever I wanted I would someday possess. Is that greed, or only youth? Is it hope or stupidity? As far as I was concerned the future was a book I c...”

“From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...”

“Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.”

“But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words m...”

“Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the c...”

“Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.”

“When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn't recognize her friend. Juliet hadn't bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. ...”

“Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.”