Alice Hoffman

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.

Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

Interesting, but she could see that the boy didn't have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species.

I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.

She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when they're no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, across the universe.

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

The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none.

When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn't recognize her friend. Juliet hadn't bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.

But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

There is no fiercer enemy than a word. A word that can be written down in pages and punctuated by quotation marks and commas and spelled out in contracts and poems and sighs, in old whispers and song lyrics, in promises and vows.

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.

... a man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.

... the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go.

I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.