The voices / 144 fragments

Alice Hoffman

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗love justice life truth friendship mind wisdom knowledge

Archive entries

01Undated

She allowed me to understand I'd done everything I could for her, and that I, and everyone who loved her, had to step away and go on living.Now I know what she wanted from me on the day she told me she was afraid. It was exactly what I wanted when I had cancer and I thought I was going to die. I should have sat down next to her, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. That's all anyone wants. It took me a long time to figure this out. It's a complicated human puzzle. But it's never too late to know that love is all you need.

Alice Hoffman / quote

02Undated

Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that's the way we're planning it.

Alice Hoffman / quote

03Undated

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

Alice Hoffman / quote

04Undated

...who I am to talk? I dream of rain.

Alice Hoffman / quote

05Undated

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.

Alice Hoffman / quote

06Undated

I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.

Alice Hoffman / quote

07Undated

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

Alice Hoffman / quote

08Undated

From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

Alice Hoffman / quote

09Undated

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

Alice Hoffman / quote

10Undated

Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.

Alice Hoffman / quote

11Undated

Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.

Alice Hoffman / quote

12Undated

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

Alice Hoffman / quote

13Undated

Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

Alice Hoffman / quote

14Undated

He carried so much suffering that it radiated out in waves. Sorrow is like that: whenever a person runs, it comes after him; it leaves an endless trail of pain.

Alice Hoffman / quote

15Undated

Don't make me sit through reality.

Alice Hoffman / quote

16Undated

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

Alice Hoffman / quote

17Undated

Mean people are meaningless.

Alice Hoffman / quote

18Undated

It was a miracle to live as birds do, except for one thing: anyone seen in flight would surely be captured, perhaps even shot down like a crow flying above a cornfield. It's always dangerous to be different, to appear as a monster in most people's eyes, even from a distance.

Alice Hoffman / quote

19Undated

I'm trying to find someone who doesn't want to be found.""That can be as hard as looking for a shadow.

Alice Hoffman / quote

20Undated

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

Alice Hoffman / quote

21Undated

James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once that happened, they could never find their true song.

Alice Hoffman / quote

22Undated

I head a bitterness that hadn't been there before. Something was changing inside him. He'd had enough of following the rules.

Alice Hoffman / quote

23Undated

It's still horrible to wish the worst on anyone. I'm sure she had her reasons. Maybe people hurt her feelings, the same way I was hurt. A single word can feel like a rock being thrown at you.

Alice Hoffman / quote

24Undated

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

Alice Hoffman / quote