Quotes from 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

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.

I'm writing a story in my journal, and I'm searching for a true voice. I make my way through layers of acquired voices, silly voices, sententious voices, voices that are too cool and too overheated. Then they all quiet down, and I reach what I'm searching for: silence.

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

Telling a joke is like doing a linguistic pirouette. If you fall flat, it means not only that you don't have the wherewithal to do it well but also that you have misjudged your own skill, that you are fool enough to undertake something you can't finish -- and that lack of self-control or self-knowledge is a lack of grace.

Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation; for now, I've lost the ability to make the sparks fly.

If primness is a small recoil of distaste at things that give others simple and hearty pleasure, then prim is what I'm really becoming.

This language is beginning to invent another me.

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

Reading is not a project of moral improvement, but by broadening our perspective, it can make us less susceptible to the immediate seductions offered by our environment; and in the best-case scenarios, it can enlarge the scope of humane understanding, and of empathy.

The soul can shrivel from am excess of critical distance, and if I don't want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose alienation without losing my self. But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?

From then on, my idea of grace is fulfilling your talent completely, and my only idea of sin is misusing that gift. The dread of not becoming completely what you can be is so strong that sometimes later in life it will paralyze me. How horrible to do the wrong thing, the thing that doesn't express your essence - and how horrible to fall short of your powers, or to discover that they might be more meager than their seemingly limitless potential!