Alice Hoffman Quotes

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

This time next year,—this time ten years,—this time one hundred years,—probably it will be just as easy as we think it is to understand that glass of water, which now seems so plain and simple. I cannot doubt but that these things, which now seem to us so mysterious, will be no mysteries at all; that the scales will fall from our eyes; that we shall learn to look on things in a different way—when that which is now a difficulty will be the only commonsense and intelligible way of looking at the subject

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.

Sometimes you don't know what a book is about until you are finished with it and you're talking about it.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.

In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

Some people look at big things, and other people look at very small things, but in a sense, we're all trying to understand the world around us.

Once I started to look i finally began to see.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

You know so much about me and yet you don't understand me. To know is not to understand. We could know everything and still not understand anything.