Alice Hoffman

“How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.”

“He could burn her up alive; he could do it in a minute flat, and that's not easy to forget.”

“Nothing could do that to them, that's what they used to whisper as they sat on the back stairs, in the dark and the dust, as if desire were a matter of personal choice.”

“Sally...can no longer think of love as a reality, or even as a possibility, however remote.”

“She knows where she's going, and what she has to do. She could, after all, find her way to Route 95 South blindfolded. She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas. It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.”

“Never look back, that's what she's told herself. Don't think about swans or being alone in the dark. Don't think of storms, or lightning and thunder, or the true love you won't ever have. Life is brushing your teeth and making breakfast for your children and not thinking about things, and as it turns out, Sally is first-rate at all of this. She gets things done and done on time.”

“The children on the playground all heard her. They took off running together, as far away as possible from Antonia Owens, who might hex you if you did her wrong, and from her aunts, who might boil up garden toads and slip them into your stew, and from her mother, who was so angry and protective she might just freeze you in time, ensuring that you were forever trapped on the green grass at the age of ten or eleven.”

“Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene.”

“Listen carefully. Listen and you'll hear everything you need to know.a nightmare is a different case entirely, it's a box of black shadows and vicious red stars, something to keep carefully closed, lest the ground below be broken in twonow it's a time like any other, long minutes, tedious seconds, nothing more than flat time moving forward, like it or notit is impossible to stop some things, rainfall, for instance, and love at first sight, and the slow and steady path of sorrow the cruel and desperate variety that always accompanies yearning for someone you're bound to losewhen 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 shine like heaven, so far above us qw can never hope to reach such heights sometimes those who love you best are the ones who leave you behindhearts were made for being broken. there's really no way around it if you want to be a human being....consider what people are capable of going through in this world and how much courage it's possible to havewhen someone kisses you with everything they feel, you don't stop thinking about it for a very long time.you didn't think you were going to get married and live happily ever after did you? you're not that stupid...a book of hope that has never been finished, a list of dreams left undone.”

“even the most dependable of men will stumble every now and thenThere are some people who insist that every time one door closes, another door opens, but this isn't always the case. There are doors that are meant to stay closed, ones that lead to rooms filled with serpents, rooms of regret, rooms that will lbind you if you dare to raise your eye to the keyhole in all innocence, simply to see what's insideSilence doesn't frighten us. We can just look at each other and recognize that there is pain in this world, even on beautiful nights when twilight settles in our backyards , sifting through the grass and the hedgesyou can't change what's means to beI had found if you didn't expect much, you weren't disappointed as muchI'd simply have to live with the doubt hanging over meYou could tell she didn't want to, she was trying with all her might to hold it back, but sometimes it's impossible to do that. I know from personal experience. You have to turn yourself cold as ice in order to stop yourself, and then if anything falls from your eyes it will only be blue ice crystals, hard and unbreakable as stonepeople who have faith were ao lucky, you didn't want to ruin anything for them. you didn't want to plant doubt where there was none. you had to treat such individuals tenderly and hope that some of whatever they were feeling rubs off on youeverything is stupid when you really think about it. people get up everyday and they act like whatever they do is so important , but they're all just going to die in the end, so none of it matters.”

“what was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls.”

“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.”

“You don't fight for peace sister,' Nahara told me, 'You embrace it.”

“Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.”

“Any weapon touched by a woman, even by accident, must be cleansed with both water and prayer so that her essence would not linger, diverting the warrior who might use it next, for even the faintest touch could bring lust to that man's heart. Perhaps that meant a woman who was well trained in arms would be the superior warrior, her attention never wavering from her task.”

“At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory — if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can’t understand or explain.”

“This was what it was. The ruin of it. The depth of it. Have it once and you can have it again. That’s the riddle. That’s the truth.”

“How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I’d had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms.”

“I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.”

“Instead of going home, I drove to the library. To hell with human beings. I’d always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.”

“It was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. Someone who was alone — maybe even more alone — than I was…”

“What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul.”

“What did we know about those closest to us, really? No one ever dared to speak plainly about desire; no one said the word out loud.”

“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. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.”

“Love was like that, like a dream you didn't quite understand, one in which you didn't necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you.”

“Certainly, as a reader, I had always discovered the deepest truths in fiction; it was through reading novels that I learned about the world, a world not only of fact but of imagination and emotion.”

“In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients.”

“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.”

“He fell in love with the way she closed her eyes, long before he fell in love with her.”

“Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”

“I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I’d be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”

“That was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.”

“I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.”

“Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.”

“My mother was teaching me that the inside of something was not necessarily its outside. Always look carefully, she told me. Look with more than your eyes.”

“That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.”

“Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”

“The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet i was embittered, I wept for what i had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.”

“I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.”

“But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.”

“But in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind.”

“He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.”

“Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.”

“But can you measure someone's love? I want to know. You think you can measure love? She's kind not to laugh at me...No scale would be strong enough, she tells me. It would break to pieces under the weight.”

“What you are able to dream you are able to grow, she says to me. If you don't believe in it, it can never happen.”

“Young Sally Owens: He will hear my call a mile away. He will whistle my favorite song. He can ride a pony backwards. Young Gillian Owens: What are you doing?Young Sally Owens: Summoning up a true love spell called Amas Veritas. He can flip pancakes in the air. He'll be marvelously kind. And his favorite shape will be a star. And he'll have one green eye and one blue. Young Gillian Owens: Thought you never wanted to fall in love. Young Sally Owens: That's the point. The guy I dreamed of doesn't exist. And if he doesn't exist I'll never die of a broken heart.”

“Another world must surely exist somewhere one where she would be known in some deep way that was far beyond words.”

“He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.”

“But try as you might to protect people from danger, you cannot keep them from their true nature.”

“At midnight the wind in the trees can sound like the ocean. The moonlight can make a road appear as endless as the sea.”