“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, grandaughter, 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, quote from Incantation
“Just because something is unspoken doesn't mean that it disappears.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“In losing a friend, she is reminded of all she has lost and all she stands to lose again. There is nothing to be done to make it any easier.
We all grieve alone.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“I know who you are in your heart,' Andres said. 'That's all that matters.' And that was it. That was the moment. Now I knew how I would feel if I ever lost him. That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do was imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Some people say, 'Save yourself and you save your ways.' I say, 'Be yourself and you save your soul.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Some things you cannot wish away or think away. They become part of you when you remember them.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Still, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a mistake for people like us to be tied to a place. If we weren't meant to be ready and willing to wander. If everything we needed was contained in who we were.
And what we remember.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“You cannot dispute the ridiculous. You cannot argue reasonably with evil.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.' ...'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“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, quote from Incantation
“But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say 'No. I disagree.' that was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“We had to survive to remember. Otherwise everything we were would disappear. Those people we loved would fade as though we'd never loved them, as if they'd never walked and talked and burned, forgetting them was the real evil. That was the hole of darkness.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“...but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“I was beginning to understand.My grandmother's love was cold because she was afraid of things;that was why everything had to be perfect.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Maybe a hundred years ago our people should have run away from this place, I said...
And then run from the next place and the next place and the place after that? You run once, what makes you think you won't have to run all the rest of your life?... We love moment to moment... Everything changes. One minute we are part of the river, and the next we are joined with the sea.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Never look at other people's bad fortune,' my mother said. 'If you do, it will come back to find you instead of its rightful owner.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden. ”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“And then I understood that she had no idea what she'd done to my family. She thought love and hatred were equal.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the first thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me. Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul.
When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“That's why there are ten gates to pass through before you reach the garden. If life were easy there would be one gate. There would be no gates at all.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Let everyone see the blood,' he said. 'Don't clean it up. That's the only way people remember.'... I could see the blood inside my head. It was with me forever, whether or not I wanted to forget.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“Abra DeMadrigal didn't look young enough to be my sister anymore. Her sorrow weighed her down and aged her. She was still beautiful, but she looked very far away. No wonder our people had raven eyes, so distant, so sad. No matter how wise she was, my mother looked like a woman who hadn't truely believed how much evil there was in our world. Not until this moment. ”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“This kind of knowing you can never tell to anyone. If you want us to survive, you cannot trust a soul'... 'Not for any reason on this earth. You can never tell,”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“What did you see?' he asked then.
Nothing,' I told him. 'Because nothing is what you wanted me to see, though the man on the table might disagree.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
“I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Incantation
Alice Hoffman
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
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“None of this was supposed to happen, [...] but all of it did. I can't feel bas about it and I can't fell sorry about it, because I'm not. It's just the way things have turned out, and honestly, it's not our fault.”
― Estelle Maskame, quote from Did I Mention I Need You? (Did I Mention I Love You
“Was he happy? One would ask that question in vain. A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities, so that the actual truth can be contrasted with partly real probabilities and reflect itself in them.”
― Bruno Schulz, quote from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
“Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy.”
― Miranda July, quote from The First Bad Man
“religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
“The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
The Immortals of Mel...
Archangel's Kiss
V.
Mostly Harmless
November 9
FeedBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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