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

— Alice Hoffman

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

I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful, and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.

— Alice Hoffman

I could hardly get a boy to look at me. All right, they'd look, they'd even take me out, but no one asked for a second date. I was too nasty, a real wise guy, and all the boys could tell what my rotten disposition was. Deep down, I wanted a commitment with a capital C. To get anywhere with me, a boy would have to sign his undying loyalty with his own blood.

— 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.

— Alice Hoffman

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, granddaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

— Alice Hoffman

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

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.

— Alice Hoffman

I knew the power of a single wish, after all. Invisible and inevitable, like a butterfly that beats its wings in one corner of the globe and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world.

— Alice Hoffman

I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

— Alice Hoffman