Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers Quotes

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.

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

Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

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.

The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none.

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