Alice Hoffman Quotes

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

He asked <...> Rosemary, why do you love books so much? And I said, Well, I don't know <...> I suppose I love them because they're quiet, and I can take them to the park.

I’ve learned that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book.

I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?

Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

Oh, I can't describe my home. It is home, and I can't put its charm into words

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

For a stalk to grow or a flower to open there must be time that cannot be forced; nine months must go by for the birth of a human child; to write a book or compose music often years must be dedicated to patient research ...To find the mystery there must be patience, interior purification, silence, waiting.

Home is where your books are.

I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.

It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear.

"What is the most beautiful word in the language?" The elderly lawyer quickly replied: "Home."

When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling-and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find-I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me.

Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened. He was home again.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

I feel lucky that I read so many books as a kid because I know that no matter how much I appreciate a book now, and I can love a book very much, it's never going to be that childhood passion for a book. There's some element, something special about the way they're reading books and experiencing books that's finite.