Alice Hoffman Quotes

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

This is part of the involuntary bargain we make with the world just by being alive. We get to experiences the splendor of nature, the beauty of art, the balm of love and the sheer joy of existence, always with the knowledge that illness, injury, natural disaster, or pure evil can end it in an instant for ourselves or someone we love.

The book [The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane] is about the fact that living in this world means that your heart is necessarily going to get broken. But the book also says that's okay. That's the only way to live a truly human life - with your heart getting broken - and eventually getting flooded with love.

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.

One half of my life has put the other half in the grave.

I don't want to sound like you never feel anything - we've all loved and lost, all had a lot of pain, and we're supposed to. We're humans; it's the way it works. But it's how you manage it, how you manage those tears and that pain. How you are able to get yourself out of it.

Nature is very cruel. It is much riskier to love any living being than not. I'm painfully aware that even my little dog is a walking bundle of mortality. I'm painfully aware he's going to pass.

Love has a cost, and it's grief. Because we will always be separated from things we love. That's the nature and price of life, right? But, when you love something deeply, then you're courageous.

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying.

Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support. Life and death are connected by vulnerability. The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives. Let's not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are powerful, successful, and popular.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

To hurt is as human as to breathe.

To become a man was something, but to become a man of sorrows was far more; to bleed, and die, and suffer.

He who would love much has also much to suffer.

Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying.

Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

My life closed twice before its close

Grieving doesn't make you imperfect. It makes you human.

Each time we love,We turn a nearer and a broader markTo that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.

Hearts were made for being broken. There's really no way around it if you want to be a human being.