“Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“What men yearn for they often destroy.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“You are only worthy of what you prove yourself to be.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“You don't fight for peace sister,' Nahara told me, 'You embrace it.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“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.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“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.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Any weapon touched by a woman, even by accident, must be cleansed with both water and prayer so that her essence would not linger, diverting the warrior who might use it next, for even the faintest touch could bring lust to that man's heart. Perhaps that meant a woman who was well trained in arms would be the superior warrior, her attention never wavering from her task.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“The river runs every shade of blue that has ever been known to humankind: ink and turquoise and lapis, indigo, teal, cerulean, and ultramarine.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“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.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“You are my armor and my sword, my faith and my tresure, everything I'm fighting for.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Just know that what's done can be undone, but what's undone can never again be.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
“They carried what was holy within them, for every man was a temple, and every prayer spoken could be heard by our Father above us.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Dovekeepers
Alice Hoffman
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
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“The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.”
― Paul Scott, quote from The Towers of Silence
“The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.”
― Philip Larkin, quote from Collected Poems
“Often, maybe even usually, Bernie ended up being the smartest human in the room. Tonight was different.”
― Spencer Quinn, quote from Dog on It
“Válka, to je hlavně velký zmatek, na poli i v lidských hlavách: často člověk ani nechápe, kdo vlastně vítězí a kdo prohrává, o tom pak rozhodnou generálové a ti, co píšou dějepisné knihy.”
― Primo Levi, quote from If Not Now, When?
“If I were asked under what sky the human mind…has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions to some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life…again I should point to India. Max Müller”
― Huston Smith, quote from The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
The Buccaneers
The Damned Utd
Reamde
In the Miso Soup
Smart Thinking: Thre...BookQuoters 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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