Alice Hoffman Quotes

He realized how little he knew of this world, but he knew this: If you could love someone, you possessed a soul. (p348)

Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)

Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder. (p298)

'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)

You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)

It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world. (p215)

the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)

She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)

Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)

This is how it began, out of water, out of clay, out of air, when it was not expected, when it should have never happened, when no one else understood who she was. (p113)

What they held in common was their aloneness, and in time, thrown together, with no world other than their own, they grew close. (p103)

"We must hope for the best," she told the girl. She might have said more if she'd had the freedom to speak her mind, but in her formation she hadn't been given the choice to confide what she felt. If she could do so there would have been much she would have said: how green the verdant countryside was, how bright the light had become, how grateful she was to her maker each and every minute, how the birds in the treetops could be heard even when the train rumbled by, how the first of the season's bees hit against the windowpanes as if searching for flowers, how absolutely marvelous it was to be in the world. (p72)

The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)

If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you've never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden. (first lines)

I always think it helps not to think about anyone reading your work, but to write what you would want to read.