Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Alice Hoffman

74 quotes

“I wrote to remind myself that in the darkest hour the roses still bloom, the stars still come out at night (preface)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've often wondered if I spent too much time inside of books. If perhaps I ended up getting lost in there. I feared that reading, and later writing, stopped me from living a full life in the real world. I still don't know the answer to this, but I'm not sure I would have gotten past being twelve without Ray Bradbury, and I know that imagining the plot for my novel The River King during a lengthy bone scan helped me get through that test. (p 35)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During my radiation treatment I read Man's Search for Meaning. People said, Isn't that book depressing? But it wasn't. It was honest...We are all responsible for our actions, and our reactions. We are responsible for how we respond to situations we cannot control. (p 43)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Write it down. Even if it's a few sentences. Because you won't remember. You think you will never forget, but you will. Write down your life story or a poem. Sometimes shorter is better. Make a list of what all you have loved in this unfair and beautiful world. (p 82)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p59)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p84)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can't begin to understand. (p145)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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." (p161)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of us know what it's like to try to escape a family legacy of one sort or another, only to discover that in the long run we carry our heritage with us no matter how far we might run.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Witches are outsiders, and those among us who have been bullied and ostracized can relate to their plight. Part of our fascination with witches is that they are the only female mythic figures with power. These are women who don't need to be rescued by a prince or a king but, instead, can save”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The family dynamics are complex; and as often happens in our own lives, how we view the people close to us, even when they are fictional characters, depends on where we stand in the world at that time.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believed anything can happen. It was a huge escape for me as reader. I loved anything that could remove me from reality and make me see possibilities. Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always tried to go directly from sleep to the computer, before I have the time to start censoring myself. I like to get up at 5:00. I do my best work early in the morning before the world's awake. For the kind of fiction I write, which is emotional fiction, you have to let go. Let the walls down, the defenses down. Don't worry about what people are going to think.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always feel you're writing the book you couldn't find, so you have to write it yourself.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe literature can change things”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town. If a damp spring arrived, if cows in the pasture gave milk that was runny with blood, if a colt died of colic or a baby was born with a red birthmark stamped onto his cheek, everyone believed that fate must have been twisted, at least a little, by those women over on Magnolia Street. It didn't matter what the problem was-lightning, or locusts, or a death by drowning. It didn't matter if the situation could be explained by logic, or science, or plain bad luck. As soon as there was a hint of trouble or the slightest misfortune, people began pointing their fingers and placing blame. Before long they'd convinced themselves that it wasn't safe to walk past the Owens house after dark, and only the most foolish neighbors would dare to peer over the black wrought-iron fence that circled the yard like a snake. (beginning)”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I start writing a novel with a question I need answered. Practical Magic addresses serious questions about the place of women in our society-questions that are as important, or more so, than they were twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, the place of a woman in society has not moved forward as we had wished, then and now. There are still many of the same issues left to address: equal pay, childcare, healthcare, sexual assault. Magic may not be able to right these wrongs, but sisterhood just might. The years have only intensified the importance of telling women's stories, and doing our best to ensure that women who have been forced to be silent can speak and tell their own truths.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I loved magic from the start, beginning with the stories my Russian grandmother told me. If "magic" was in the title of a book, I was bound to find it. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter-of fact tone, with the practical and the magical living side by side. One day there is a knock at the door, or a rose that blooms through the winter, or a spindle that must be avoided at all costs. It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. My personal experience and my childhood reading left me longing for a world in which anything could happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day.”
Alice Hoffman (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source