Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Hoffman

Secrets have a half-life in Hoffman’s telling: they don’t stay buried because they can’t. The line starts with an almost casual “I think,” a soft qualifier that lures you into something that sounds like common sense. Then she pivots to reportage - a therapist friend, a blunt quote - and suddenly the claim isn’t philosophical, it’s practical. This is how Hoffman makes moral dread feel domesticated: not in a courtroom, not in a confessional booth, but in an office where you pay by the hour and tell the truth because it’s finally cheaper than carrying it.

The intent isn’t to scold. It’s to normalize the existence of darkness without sensationalizing it. “Horrible things” stays deliberately vague, letting the reader’s imagination do the dirty work. That vagueness is a narrative tactic Hoffman uses in her fiction too: the specific crime matters less than the psychic pressure of hiding it. By refusing detail, she points to a culture that’s obsessed with lurid revelation while still structured around secrecy. People want absolution without exposure; therapy becomes the modern sacrament.

The subtext is unsettlingly democratic. The “more than you know” lands like a warning: monstrosity isn’t an outlier, it’s a neighbor. Hoffman’s context - a novelist steeped in domestic interiors and private hauntings - matters here. She’s less interested in evil as spectacle than as something that cohabits with ordinary life, waiting for the conditions (guilt, safety, exhaustion) that make confession inevitable.