Best 23 quotes of Eva Hoffman on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward. The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge.

Happy! That will-o'-the-wisp.

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.

I've become immune to desire; I snip the danger of wanting in the bud.

I wish I could breathe a Nabokovian air. I wish I could have the Olympian freedom of sensibility that disdains, in his autobiography, to give the Russian Revolution more than a passing mention, as if such common events did not have the power to wreak fundamental changes in his own life, or as if it were vulgar, tactless, to dwell on something so brutishly, so crudely collective. I wish I could define myself -a s Nabokov defines both himself and his characters - by the telling detail, as preference for months over lozenges, an awkwardness at cricket, a tendency to lose floes or umbrellas. I wish I could live in a world of prismatic reflections, carefully distinguished colours of sunsets and English scarves, synthetic repetitions and reiterative surprises - a world in which even a reddened nostril can be rendered as a delicious hue rather than a symptom of a discomfiting common cold. I wish I could attain such a world because in part that is our most real, and most loved world - the world of utterly individual sensibility, untrampled by history, or horrid intrusions of social circumstance. Oh ye, I think the Nabokovian world is lighted, lightened, and enlightened by the most precise affection. Such affection is unsentimental because it is free and because it attaches to free objects. It can notice what is adorable (or odious, for that matter), rather than what is formed and deformed by larger forces. Characters, in Nabokov's fiction, being perfectly themselves, attain the graced amorality of aesthetic objects.

Pleasure exists in middle time, in time that is neither too accelerated or too slowed down.

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

There is the great ocean below, and the great sky above, and nothing between me and pure possibility.

The story isn't over, it isn't foreclosed, and that's the point: there's a tiny chink into the future that might be wedged open.

This is a society in which you are who you think you are. Nobody gives you your identity here, you have to reinvent yourself every day." He is right, I suspect, but I can't figure out how this is done. You just say what you are and everyone believes you? That seems like a confidence trick to me, and not one I think I can pull off. Still, somehow, invent myself I must. But how do I choose from identity options available all around me? I feel, once again, as I did when facing those ten brands of toothpaste - faint from excess, paralysed by choice.

This language is beginning to invent another me.

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.