Shilo > Shilo's Quotes

“There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.”
― Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.”
― Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House

“He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.”
― Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House

“...and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole wold smelled like pie.”
― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

“I can hurt myself more than anyone else can," she told her sister. "I can do it with my eyes closed.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“He fell in love with the way she closed her eyes, long before he fell in love with her.”
― Alice Hoffman, Illumination Night

“Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.”
― Alice Hoffman, Incantation

“What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

“I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

“Some people say, 'Save yourself and you save your ways.' I say, 'Be yourself and you save your soul.”
― Alice Hoffman, Incantation

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”
― Louise Penny, Still Life

“This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true! We find this out for ourselves very clearly when by some terrible chance we're suddenly stopped in the middle of doing something and we're left dangling there, suspended. We realize then, that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action.”
― Luigi Pirandello

“I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them...to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters.”
― Horton Foote

“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, The Dovekeepers

“Dreams came to men for many reasons, both as oracles and as warnings.”
― Alice Hoffman, 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, The Dovekeepers

“As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers

“...the summer of the gypsy moths when all the trees in their yard were bare, the leaves chewed by caterpillars. You could hear crunching in the night. You could see silvery cocoon webbing in porch rafter and strung across stop signs.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“...even though she felt a wave of dread. If they knew she was nervous, she'd be at their mercy. But if they thought she was ice they'd be afraid to touch her.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“...the eldest who had the misfortune of being too beautiful and had a far off look in her eyes. Madame Cohen had seen what could happen to girls like that, they were picked off like fruit on a tree, devoured by blackbirds.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“Your grand daughter may not be looking for trouble, but trouble is looking for her.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“What people called the truth seemed worthless to her; what was it but a furtive, bruised story to convince yourself life was worth living.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“What was a demon but a lost soul, one that had been forced to use his skills to survive.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one.”
― Alice Hoffman , The Story Sisters

“The only people out at this hour were ones who couldn't sleep, those haunted by one thing or another: love thwarted, love lost, love thrown away. They were the sort of people who didn't want to be noticed, who wanted to slip through shadows, be alone with their despair.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“If you believed in something strongly and give it enough credence, it could appear right in front of you. Though it had been created in your mind, it would claim a presence in the real world, a monster at your door, a demon pulling at your coat sleeve.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Story Sisters

“Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen