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"When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn't recognize her friend. Juliet hadn't bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way loved walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed."
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"If love has taken us for a ride and passion made us ignore sham and swindle, the time has come to separate the wheat from the chaff and polish up diamonds of trust, neatly, day by day. ['Taken for a ride']"

"This last week has been a little hell for both of us simply because I didn't understand my own feelings. And because I can't understand them, I blame her for provoking in me feelings that make my world seem suddenly unsafe."

"Unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long."

"My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist."

"Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else " someone like the blonde ticket-seller."

"She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone-to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny."

"Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."

"It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;-it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others."

"Once someone learns what a relationship comes to teach, the relationship can move on to make room for new teachers to come in with new lessons and new levels of love."

"For marriage is like life in this-that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses."
Explore more quotes by Alice Hoffman

"I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It's always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay."

"Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected."

"I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was."

"He carried so much suffering that it radiated out in waves. Sorrow is like that: whenever a person runs, it comes after him; it leaves an endless trail of pain."

"James had a theory about caged birds, one he hoped to prove when he became a scientist someday. He believed that all birds that had their freedom taken from them eventually lost their voices. Once that happened, they could never find their true song."

"We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall upon instructions of the minim offer not solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us."

"Interesting, but she could see that the boy didn't have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species."

"Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen."
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