Quotes from Alice Hoffman

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.

if a person doesn't speak her mind she will carry her resentment until it burns her

There were other spells, not medicinal treatments, but spiritual, ancient enchantments that began with the Hebrew word Abracadabra, I create as I speak, taken from the even earlier Aramaic chant, Avra kadavra, It will be created in my words.

Fate is what you make of it. You can make the best of it, or you can let it make the best of you.

In such great works I found enlightenment and came to understand that everything God creates is a miracle, individually and unto itself.

who I am to talk? I dream of rain.

She understood love. What destroys you saves you, she had told me.

Life was worth living, no matter what fate might bring.

What was desire anyway, when examined in the clear light of day? Was it the way a woman searched for her clothes in the morning, or the manner in which a man might watch her sit before the mirror and comb her hair? Was it a pale November dawn, when ice formed on windowpanes and crows called from the bare black trees? Or was it the way a person might yield to the night, setting forth on a path so unexpected that daylight would never again be completely clear?

You rescue something and you're responsible for it. But maybe that's what love is. Maybe it's like a hit-and-run accident; it smashes you before you can think. You do it no matter the cost and you keep on running.

life. She was only a girl and exhausted from her journey, but she would do as she must in order to survive.

The worst thing in the world for a mother is to leave her child. She couldn't bring herself to remember you, because if she did she'd have to leave you behind.