Alice Hoffman Quotes

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.

I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.

We can't feel anything - all that's left inside us is dust.

Sometimes when you have lost, you don't want to speak to anybody.

I felt like a failure, like somehow my self-worth was tied to my ability to procreate. I didn't feel like I could talk about it. I did not want other people's pity, so I mostly kept my story and my feelings to myself.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

It seemed impossible that there could be people in the world who still desired food, who laughed, who neither knew nor cared that Sirius Black was gone forever.

I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. If I never loved I never would have cried...I am a rock.

Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes — The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs — The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round — Of Ground, or Air, or Ought — A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone — This is the Hour of Lead — Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow — First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

They can't hurt me. I'm not like the rest of you. There's no one left I love.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

I can’t imagine what my school friends must have thought was going on because I was wandering around in some kind of dream. I felt as though my insides had been taken out which is, I now realize, the right feeling.

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses. At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We get up every morning, skip breakfast, hurry off to work or school. For in those other places, we are more at home. And sometimes we stagger beneath the weight of grief, the immensity of aloneness.

Great sorrows cannot speak.

For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart: He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.

I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.

Nothing for preserving the body like having no heart.

Tears were dripping onto my dress, but I wasn't making any sound. There was no sound to express thid kind of pain. I didn't want to move, didn't want to do anything. Fang was not waiting for me out in the living room. Tomorrow morning, when I woke up, Fang would still be gone.