Alice Hoffman Quotes

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

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.

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.

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

The adults don't know what's happening on the kids' universe and the kids don't know what's happening on the adults' universe

When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.

Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever.

Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go." From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned.

I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

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

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

That's why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all.

They weren't true stories; they were better than that.

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.

This day is going to be awful. It's the sort of day you wouldn't mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

I just finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," which I think is a work of genius.

Sometimes movies really are the best medicine.

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

Just because something is unspoken doesn't mean that it disappears.

Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.

Still, she knows one thing for certain: never judge a relationship unless you are the one wrapped up in its arms.

Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?

I love science fiction but especially his because it's so humane.

Never look at other people's bad fortune,' my mother said. 'If you do, it will come back to find you instead of its rightful owner.

You can't dispute the ridiculous. You can't argue reasonably with evil.

I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, 'More than you know.'.

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

No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.

Do what you want, do what you will, do what you have to, do what you think you cannot.

You have to choose the voice you are going to trust. You can't listen to everyone.

If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.

What men yearn for they often destroy.

She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He's like a dragon, ancient and fearless.

Crying wasn't like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it's done.

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

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

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.

We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.

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.