Eva Hoffman Quotes

#1. When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all - because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

Eva Hoffman

#2. There is nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.

Eva Hoffman

#3. Sometimes I long to forget ... It is painful to be conscious of two worlds.

Eva Hoffman

#4. The wonder is what you can make a paradise out of.

Eva Hoffman

#5. If we rush ceaselessly through disconnected activities without checking in on our moods or motives, we can lose track of ourselves; in a sense, we lose the ability to experience our experiences. A

Eva Hoffman

#6. Anger can be borne - it can even be satisfying - if it can gather into words and explode in a storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without these means of ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling like a head of stream - building to an impotent, murderous rage.

Eva Hoffman

#7. To be an adult is to be close to death.

Eva Hoffman

#8. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become
and such lucidity is a form of joy.

Eva Hoffman

#9. The worst losses come at night.

Eva Hoffman

#10. Momentary pleasures of hedonism are distinct from deeper and more lasting satisfaction; and in order to achieve such satisfaction, we need to reflect on who we are and what our lives are for. We cannot be fully human without thinking about what being human means.

Eva Hoffman

#11. A woman should love with her mind. Let men love with their hearts.

Eva Hoffman

#12. It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein.

Eva Hoffman

#13. The vision of an entire world becoming just like us is at least as discomfiting as the thought that most of it won't.

Eva Hoffman

#14. Observing what is around us and registering errant impressions is a state not so much of passive inaction as of alert receptivity. Allowing ourselves to notice, to be open to our surroundings, is a way of awakening our curiosity in the world outside ourselves. The

Eva Hoffman

#15. Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation.

Eva Hoffman

#16. I never fail to be moved by knowing that the ground on which I walk is layered with the past- with achievement and strife and the repeated passions and conflicts of the human creature, always changing, always the same. Generations passing like grass.

Eva Hoffman

#17. I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.

Eva Hoffman

#18. The authentic is almost never found by being pursued; but there is no missing it when you are in its presence.

Eva Hoffman

#19. Why look any further if you've discovered complete satisfaction.

Eva Hoffman

#20. While we allow the inhabitants of imaginary remote corners the authenticity of savages or sufferers, we rarely suppose them to possess the authenticity of complex, sophisticated perceptions.

Eva Hoffman

#21. Perhaps, if we don't always have a conscious conscience, we have a subliminal one, from which the memory of past wrongs is not so easily erased.

Eva Hoffman