30 Quotes by Eva Hoffman

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A power struggle is always better than absolute power.