Eva Hoffman Quotes
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The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become--and such lucidity is a form of joy.
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I am walking home from school slowly, playing a game in which it's forbidden to step on the cracks between the slabstone squares of the pavement. The sun is playing its game of lines and shadows. Nothing happens. There is nothing but this moment, in which I am walking toward home, walking in time. But suddenly, time pierces me with its sadness. This moment will not last. With every step I take, a sliver of time vanishes. Soon, I'll be home, and then this, this nowness will be the past, I think, and time seems to escape behind me, like an invisible current being sucked into an invisible vortex. How can this be, that this fullness, this me on the street, this moment which is perfectly abundant, will be gone? It's like that time I broke a large porcelain doll and no matter how much I wished it back to wholeness, it lay there on the floor in pieces. I can't do anything about this backward tug either. How many moments do I have in life? I hear my own breathing: with every breath, I am closer to death. I slow down my steps: I'm not home yet, but soon I will be, now I am much closer, but not yet… not yet… not yet… Remember this, I command myself, as if that way I could make some of it stay. When you're grown up, you'll remember this. And you'll remember how you told yourself to remember.
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Why look any further if you've discovered complete satisfaction.
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The structures of collective and personal life in Polish shtetls were so exactly defined as to be infinitely replicable — as the structure of a honeycomb is replicable throughout a beehive. Each shtetl was a self-contained world, and each was utterly recognizable as an instance of its kind. This consistency, the patterned predictability of life, was undoubtedly part of the shtetl's strength. But it also meant that the shtetl was a deeply conservative organism, resistant to innovation, individuality, or rebellion. It is hard to think of any analogues to the early shtetl society, for its character was part untouchable and part Brahmin, simultaneously ancient and pioneering, both pragmatically materialistic and sternly religious. It was a peculiar, idiosyncratic form of a rural, populist theocracy.
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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.
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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.
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There is nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face.
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The authentic is almost never found by being pursued; but there is no missing it when you are in its presence.
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Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation; for now, I've lost the ability to make the sparks fly.
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I want to tell A Story, Every Story, everything all at once, not anything in particular that might be said through the words I know, and I try to roll all sounds into one, to accumulate more and more syllables, as if they might make a Möbius strip of language in which everything, everything is contained. There is a hidden rule even in this game, though - that the sounds have to resemble real syllables, that they can't disintegrate into brute noise, for then I wouldn't be talking at all. I want articulation - but articulation that says the whole world at once.
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There is the great ocean below, and the great sky above, and nothing between me and pure possibility.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!