Eva Hoffman Quotes & Sayings

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

Why look any further if you've discovered complete satisfaction. — Eva Hoffman

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

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

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

Sometimes I long to forget ... It is painful to be conscious of two worlds. — Eva Hoffman

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

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

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

The worst losses come at night. — Eva Hoffman

It is a sunny fall afternoon and I'm engaged in one of my favorite pastimes - picking chestnuts. I'm playing alone under the spreading, leafy, protective tree. My mother is sitting on a bench nearby, rocking the buggy in which my sister is asleep. The city, beyond the lacy wall of trees, is humming with gentle noises. The sun has just passed its highest point and is warming me with intense, oblique rays. I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as if it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I'm holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plenitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me. — Eva Hoffman

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

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. — Eva Hoffman

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

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

To be an adult is to be close to death. — Eva Hoffman

A woman should love with her mind. Let men love with their hearts. — Eva Hoffman

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

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

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

Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation. — Eva Hoffman

No, I'm no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the
country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is
a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our
marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind
and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it
would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is
the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, percep-
tions, sounds, the human kind ... no geometry of landscape,
no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes
that we saw as the fi rst, and to which we gave ourselves wholly,
without reservation. — Eva Hoffman

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

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