“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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“The world is full of annoyances, none more infuriating than a fool with a valid point.”
― K.J. Parker, quote from Devices and Desires
“The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself.… The whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge … where my heart stopped.… Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant … staring out to sea!… A female with a left tusk broken off near the base.… I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.” This was the Matriarch herself.… She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing. My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place.… The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind. I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man.… Early afternoon. They were coming to this place, to this tall grass, all along. They will feed here for a while and then, because there’s no water right here, go down to where those egrets are. There’s water there. After they’ve had a good drink, they might make a big loop and come back here again later to feed some more. It will be a one-family-at-a-time choice as the adults decide when to drink and bathe. When elephants are finally ready to make a significant move, everyone points in the same direction. But they do wait until the matriarch decides. “I’ve seen families cued up waiting for half an hour,” comments Vicki, “waiting for the matriarch to signal, ‘Okay.’” And now they go. Makelele, eleven years old, walks with a deep limp. Five years ago he showed up with a broken right rear leg. It must have been agony, and it’s healed at a horrible angle, almost as if his knee faces backward, shaping that leg like the hock on a horse. Yet he is here, surviving with a little help from his friends. “He’s slow,” Vicki acknowledges. “It’s remarkable that he’s managing, but his family seems to wait for him.” Another Amboseli elephant, named Tito, broke a leg when he was a year old, probably from falling into a garbage pit.”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
“Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.”
― Kate Quinn, quote from The Alice Network
“There’s an Oriental saying I like: “If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“Coming home is hard." Ven said.
"It shouldn't be" Daleina said. "They love me. I love them. It should be easy."
"Once you leave, it's never easy again. Or at least it's never the same. You're not the same. You can't expect them to be.
She nodded. "Sometimes they feel like strangers. And still, I'd die to protect them.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, quote from The Queen of Blood
Sweetheart
Whistling In the Dar...
The Hob's Bargain
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Big Fish
Hunt the MoonBookQuoters 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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