Alice Hoffman

Don't make me sit through reality.

He carried so much suffering that it radiated out in waves. Sorrow is like that: whenever a person runs, it comes after him; it leaves an endless trail of pain.

Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

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

Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.

Life was beautiful, everyone knew that, but it was also bitter and bleak and unfair as hell and where did that leave a person? On the outs with the rest of the world. Someone who sat alone in the cafeteria, reading, escaping from his hometown simply by turning the page.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

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.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.

Unrequited love is so boring. Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs.

...who I am to talk? I dream of rain.

Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that's the way we're planning it.

She allowed me to understand I'd done everything I could for her, and that I, and everyone who loved her, had to step away and go on living.Now I know what she wanted from me on the day she told me she was afraid. It was exactly what I wanted when I had cancer and I thought I was going to die. I should have sat down next to her, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. That's all anyone wants. It took me a long time to figure this out. It's a complicated human puzzle. But it's never too late to know that love is all you need.

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.

Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.