752 Quotes by Alice Hoffman

Once I knew nothing about McKay and now I knew everything about him. This seemed as good as any reason for not walking out the door. There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names.

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.

The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.

For six months I did what women do: I waited. This is what women are taught to be good at. It's said that a woman's life is merely preparation for the primal nine-month wait. Whatever the reason, they do it well. Sometimes they drink or bite their fingernails down to the wrist. They count stars and initials and wait: for something to happen, for something to pass, to change, to begin, to end.

As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.

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.

There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight.

Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality.

...and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole wold smelled like pie.