Quotes from Alice Hoffman

I'm old, Franny reminded him when she noticed his bleak expression. But it's still me in here. So be careful. Vincent laughed, then offered his arm so that Franny could link her arm through his.

Honesty was like a stone, dropped and irretrievable once it was spoken aloud

You didn't have to be cursed in love to know that when you loved someone you were open to great loss.

Tell me you won't walk away again and I'll call the whole thing off.

They believe that every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

To hell with them," Fanny remarked. Had her sister learned nothing at the Starling School? Other people's judgments were meaningless unless you allowed them to mean something.

What she feels for him is so deep, she aches. She supposes this is what people refer to when they say the pangs of love, as if your innermost joy cannot help but cause you anguish as well.

Before she can stop herself, she thinks about desire, how it lives within you and yet is separate, surfacing when it chooses, without permission, in the harsh afternoon light, at the moment when you least expect to find it.

They've become sleepwalkers, wandering through their own nightmares, each avoiding the others for fear that a word, a conversation, a kiss will make them realize they aren't dreaming.

She wishes she had time to run around the block once or twice; maybe then she wouldn't feel as if she were about to burn up or shatter.

Families are the Nurseries of all Societies: and the First combinations of mankind.

Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality," the

Somehow, what they'd had was already over, and she hadn't even been aware of the end. This happened with roses: it was possible to take them for granted all summer as they wound along fences and gates, and then in September, when they faded, how beautiful they'd once been suddenly took hold. That was when people began to yearn for them, and all winter long they'd watch the bare branches for buds, vowing that this time they'd be grateful for all that they had.

When darkness fell, he told me to close my eyes and dream, for in my dreams I would find another world, and in my waking life I would soon enough find such a world as well...

But love was not about practice or preparation, it was pure chance; if you took your time with it you ran the risk of having it evaporate before it had even begun.

To love someone so complicated you had to be committed to a single emotion—the way you loved him—no matter what. In that way, it was indeed simple.

A lot of people don't know what to do about grief. I don't blame you for a thing.

It's pure vanity to presume that love exists only on our terms. A red lead may be the universe for the tortoise beetle or the ladybird. A single touch the ecstasy of a lifetime. (180)

once a girl walked into a library she could never be controlled again.

The most glorious hour in Manhattan was when twilight fell in sheets across the Great Lawn. Bands of blue turned darker by the moment as the last of the pale light filtered through the boughs of cherry trees and black locusts. In October, the meadows turned gold; the vines were twists of yellow and red.

They'll never meet him. They'll never know that its actually possible for a boy to be so boring you'd agree to kiss him just to get him to shut up. I should get paid to listen to him talk when he calls on the phone. I should get a dollar fifty a hour. Minimum.

Life is a mystery, and it should be so, for the sorrow that accompanies being human and

I'd thrown my fate away once, and I would never again allow other people's opinions rule my life. As a girl I'd done what was necessary, but I was a girl no longer.

I wished to be forgiven. 'It was always so in the eyes of God,' Shirah told me.