Alice Hoffman Quotes

But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

My mother walks forward. She's crying, but there's a smile on her face. For God's sake, is it any wonder I can't ever understand what you people are feeling?

I don't like feeling vulnerable. I think my mum and dad's divorce affected me more than I let on.

Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them.

You can't underestimate how traumatic divorce is for the children.

We need to become more acutely conscious that words matter. None of us would deny that ideas and opinions matter, but we can sometimes be careless about how we express them. The words we choose to advance an idea, opinion, or point of view have a huge impact on how people react and respond to that view. When we use hyperbole, we increase the chances of being misunderstood and of promoting equally exaggerated counter-reactions, especially when people are reacting almost instantaneously.

It was never my intention to hurt people's feelings.

I built up so much hatred for my parents, like so much anger for the life they had given me.

As I get older, my perspective changes, and I just see how relationships aren't always what they appear to be. It's one of those sad but true things. We can see sometimes when people are becoming distant in all the things that create breaking apart, as painful as it is, and at the same time, still appreciating that person.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

I never knew I had the power to hurt him, only that he possessed the power to hurt me.

I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all.

When I wake up, my pillow’s cold and damp with tears. But tears for what? I have no idea.

Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred.

The confusing lesson whipped Frankie's anger into something she had never felt before. It was like an emotional meringue - the airy feeling of loneliness topped with the hard crisp of injustice. Yet its taste was far from sweet.

Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

Only then does he realize what he has done to Mirabelle, how wanting a square inch of her and not all of her has damaged them both, and how he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.

Thomas hated the people who'd taken this poor, innocent kid form his family. He hated them with a passion he didn't know a human could feel. He wanted them dead, tortured, even. He wanted Chuck to be happy. But happiness had been ripped form their lives. Love had been ripped from their lives.

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.