Eva Hoffman Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The worst losses come at night.