Alice Hoffman Quotes

When my son was murdered, people asked me how I felt about God and what had happened to my son. I said, 'No, you can't go there. You have to understand that there is a devil, and he works 24/7. Whoever murdered our son was with the devil.'

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

Then, in my most careful handwriting, come all the details it would be a crime to forget. Lady licking Prim's cheek. My father's laugh. Peeta's father with the cookies. The colour of Finnick's eyes. What Cinna could do with a length of silk. Boggs reprogramming the Holo. Rue poised on her toes, arms slightly extended, like a bird about to take flight. On and on. We seal the pages with salt water and promises to live well to make their death count.

You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?

I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it's a way of experiencing the person that you've lost again.

I don't smile much, and I never laugh. If you'd been through what I've been through, you wouldn't be smiling, either.

In December 1988, my mother died of lung cancer. I died too. I couldn't function.

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

I am my heart's undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.

Blood and death. That moves me.

Anyone who's lost someone to cancer will say this, that you have to struggle to try to remember the person before the diagnosis happened, because they really do change - as anyone would change.

I have been touched by extreme violence, and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil.

Words do not pay for my dead people.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

It takes an extraordinary toll on me to re-live my experiences, the horrors of my past and the pain I had to endure. And yet, I believe remembering is the only way to promote healing, to promote awareness and accountability.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

This whole country is a graveyard, and we are all constantly walking on the bones

A piece of each of us died.