30 Quotes by Eva Hoffman

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?

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.

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.

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 language is beginning to invent another me.

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.

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.

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