Alice Hoffman

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

“My mother was teaching me that the inside of something was not necessarily its outside. Always look carefully, she told me. Look with more than your eyes.”

“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.”

“Love was never a mistake,even when it wasn't returned.”

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

“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.”

“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.'”

“I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.”

“Feelings are best left concealed. They can bite you if you're not careful. They can eat you alive.”

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

“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.”

“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”

“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.”

“In my memories I have set my life in Brooklyn between pieces of glass, separate from my current existence, and this has enabled me to move forward. The past cannot tie me in knots, nor can it cause me to drown. And yet what is stored in glass belongs to me still. Each piece is a part of me: the hummingbirds, the locked doors, Mr. Morris in the yard, the pear tree, the woman covered by bees, and you. Especially you.”

“He was withdrawing. I think it was getting harder for him to accept his fate. Like a bird in a cage, he grew silent.”

“I always quit at three when my kids come home from school so I feel pretty spoiled.”

“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.”

“There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.”

“When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you're with me always.”

“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.”