Quotes from Alice Hoffman

Those women who could read were revered and feared, for they were the most skilled in love magic.

I could tell people anything I wanted to and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well, then that's who I'd be.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life

It was then that Nathaniel truly began to appreciate the years he had spent alone in his room, the distance from other people that had given him the ability to observe and to feel what another might had also made him a writer.

She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

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.

When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.

I knelt by the fire to make certain there were no burning embers left. That was when I spied the tracks of a lion. There were only a few such beasts left in the desert, but one had come here, answering my call. He had been there all the while, watching over me, before he left me at last.

It was the time when the field mice ventured out, after the hawks had settled in the trees but before the owls came to hunt. The sky was now the color Elv liked best - a tender dark blue, falling to earth like ashes.

They may be nothing like you, he had written, they may surprise you, they may even repel you when their behavior is out of control, when they climb out their windows and drink underage and break every rule, but you will love them in a way you had not thought possible before, no matter who they turn out to be.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.