Alice Hoffman

“I thought that love was a river, endless and deep. I thought it merely happened, washing over you like water. It was nothing to search for, nothing to force. I didn't understand that even when we can't control our fate, we alone have the last say in matters of the heart. We can give it freely, even in the worst of times, even when it isn't returned.”

“The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.”

“The more you feel, the stronger you are.”

“No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.”

“I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.”

“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 intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.”

“I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.”

“They carried what was holy within them, for every man was a temple, and every prayer spoken could be heard by our Father above us.”

“They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes.”

“He's nothing fierce or terrible or filled with light. He's like us, sometimes we can't even tell him apart. Sometimes we're the ones who try to save him. He's there to show us who we are. Human beings aren't gods. We makes mistakes.”

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

“He must be an idiot to feel this way, but there's nothing he can do. He doesn't even know if he can manage to speak.”

“I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything.”

“As they were falling asleep, Gillian could have sworn she heard Ben say Fate--as if they were meant to be together from the start and every single thing they'd ever done in their lives had been leading to this moment. If you thought that way, you could fall asleep without regret. You could put your whole life in place, with all the sadness and the sorrow, and still feel that at last you had everything you ever wanted. In spite of the lousy odds and all the wrong turns, you might actually discover that you were the one who'd won.”

“All this kissing was making her crazy; it was reminding her of what she could feel, and how it could be when you wanted someone as much as he wanted you.”

“At night I told myself a story, wordless, inside my head, one I liked far better than those in my books. The girl in my story was treated cruelly, by fate, by her family, even by the weather. Her feet bled from the stony paths; her hair was plucked from her head by blackbirds. She went from house to house, looking for refuge. Not a single neighbor answered his door, and so one day the girl gave up speaking. She lived on the side of a mountain where every day was snowy. She stood outside without a roof, without shelter; before long she was made of ice—her flesh, her bones, her blood. She looked like a diamond; it was possible to spy her from miles away. She was so beautiful now that everyone wanted her: people came to talk to her, but she wouldn’t answer. Birds lit on her shoulder; she didn’t bother to chase them away. She didn’t have to. If they took a single peck, their beaks would break in two. Nothing could hurt her anymore. After a while, she became invisible, queen of the ice. Silence was her language, and her heart had turned a perfect pale silver color. It was so hard nothing could shatter it. Not even stones.”

“I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.”

“Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.”

“We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall upon instructions of the minim offer not solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us.”

“Time wasn't the same anymore. Doors were slamming shut before we even knew they'd been opened. Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.”

“In the last few months, she'd had a lot of time to consider the state of mankind, and she'd decided that people actually had very few choices in their lives. Most things happened to you. Most things rolled right over you and then kept on going.”

“You can only know a friend so well after all. When you come right down to it, even your best friend is a puzzle.”

“Revenge did that to a person; it caused even the insecure and the meek to take foolhardy chances. After a while it became a way of life; the risks felt as natural as drawing a breath.”

“You had to wonder who all these people in their cars were leaving behind and who they were driving toward, and if they knew that in the distance, the echo of their tires on the asphalt sounded like a river, and that to someone like me, it could seem like the miracle I'd been looking for.”

“Well, maybe that's what love is, as state of mind ready to grace anyone willing to accept it. Anyone who cares.”

“That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.”

“Every man engaged in war tells himself he can alter what has been written, that it is he, not God, who is the maker of destiny, free to change what is meant to be.”

“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.”

“I wonder how a lioness will manage in a dovecote. Can you put away your teeth and claws?”

“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.”

“Love is ancient and mysterious and you can't mess with it. If you do it just backfires and you meet with disaster.”

“Love wasn't rational; there was no proof that it even existed outside of people's imaginings.”

“Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.”

“...make you want things you hadn't even known existed.”

“If a ghost were to consider climbing in the window, or seeping through the plaster, he might think twice about facing Maria.”

“There he is, in the fading light, certain of what he wants, certain of her. If Gillian were speaking to her sister, or more correctly, if Sally were speaking to her, Gillian would draw her over to the window to get a look. Isn't he beautiful? That's what she would have said if she and Sally had been talking. I wish I deserved him, she would have whispered into her sister's ear.”

“A fortuneteller at a magicians' convention in Atlantic City once told him that when he fell in love it would be forever, and he laughed at the notion, but now he sees that reading was completely on target.”

“Fuck you,” Sally says. She tosses the words off, easy as butter in her mouth, but in fact she doesn't think she's ever cursed out loud in her own house before.“Fuck you twice,” Gillian says. “You need it more.”

“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.”

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

“...she wonders if she has something other people don't. Intuition or hope -- she wouldn't know what to call it.”

“He backed off, the way he always does, but it won't happen a second time. If he ever sees her again he's going to go right up to her and ask her to marry him, that's what he'll do. He's sick of letting fate roll right past him.”

“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.”

“You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms -- those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about everything.”

“...and from then on whenever he smells lilacs he'll think about this moment. How the bees were circling above him, how purple the ink on the leaflets he's been distributing suddenly seemed, how he realized, all at once, just how beautiful a woman can be.”

“One thing I've learned is that strange things do happen. They happen all the time. Today, for instance, my best friend Jill's cat spoke. We were making brownies in the kitchen when we heard it say, 'Let me out.”

“One morning when the air was misleading and mild with hope....”

“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.”