Quotes from Alice Hoffman

When all was said and done, it was conceivable that a being's purpose remained the same throughout his life, and Eddie's purpose was exactly what it had been when he was a boy, to pursue the light and find what was lost. Page 87

It was a moment made of glass, this happiness; it was the easiest thing in the world to break. Every minute was a world, every hour a universe.

We know what we need when we get it, Brock Stewart had once said. Elinor understood this to be true whenever she heard Jenny in the hallway, when she looked up from her work in the garden to see a light burning in the kitchen. She knew it when the kettle on the back burner of the stove whistled, when the back door opened and shut, when the house she lived in wasn't empty. She hadn't understood how alone she'd been until she was no longer alone. She had cut herself off...

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

Is it not beautiful?" I said of the world around us. Is it not terrible?

We make our own fate. And then all at once she realized they did. They could not control it, but they could choose how to respond to what happened.

As Gary understands it, the greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself, and he and Sally have both served themselves from the same table tonight, the only difference being that he knows what he's missing, and she has no idea what is causing her to cry as she drives down the Turnpike.

All things change, for that is the way of the world we walk through.

Don't worry. I'm not afraid of words.

When a person accepted a gift from someone, she was accepting the way the giver felt about her as well, any fool knew that.

The truth is, some of your closest friends may disappear during your most difficult times. These people have their own history and traumas; they may not be able to deal with yours. They may belong to the before .

but as God created life, so did He create destruction.

Sometimes words spoken are the ones you've been afraid to think, but once they're said aloud there's no way to make them disappear.

Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peach stone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything, even to someone at the very end of their life

Meg was a great reader and was never without a book; while walking to school she often had one open in her hands, so engrossed she would sometimes trip while navigating familiar streets.

The most basic and reliable love potion was made from anise, rosemary, honey, and cloves boiled for nine hours on the back burner of the old stove.

And what of monsters? Can they love too? We know quite well they can. For we know that they do.

Jet gave the blessing from the book of poems she had given her aunt.

Those of us lucky enough to make it through the multitude of possible diseases and accidents get old. We get tired. We close our eyes." "And then? Where are we then?" Silly to ask him as though he knew, but in fact the doctor didn't hesitate. He took Elinor's hand and placed it on his chest, in the place where he knew his heart to be. "There.

You are the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all we needed.

The doctor thought of his old horse in the field whom he missed more than he ever would have thought possible. He thought of Liza Hull kissing her baby good-bye, and of his grandson in his hospital bed, and of all the people he'd seen enter this world and those he'd helped leave it behind. He was a lucky man to be sitting beside Elinor in the garden in the last green days of May. He had loved her for so many years, he would just go on doing it, with or without

She had been wrong about love. She had thought it was meant for fools alone, only to discover it was a fool who walked away from love, no matter the cost or the penalty.

It was a dangerous world for women, and more dangerous for a woman whose very bloodline would have her do not as she was ordered, but as she pleased.

The air itself smelled of peaches, here and all over Unity; when the breeze came up, petals fell like snow. If a person didn't move, if she was completely still, the petals streamed over her, catching in the hem of her clothes, in the strands of her hair, white as snow, quiet as snow, silent and fleeting and drifting down from above to cover her and carry her home.