Leah Hager Cohen Quotes & Sayings

Every sad thing, every loss or hurt really a challenge to love that much more, really just another of beauty's many strongholds. — Leah Hager Cohen

The ignorance we're ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy. — Leah Hager Cohen

Like storytelling, that incessant loving rush of explaining and repositioning and telling again, all for the sake of finding something shared, something mutually recognized
so interpreting seemed to me. It seemed a kind of goodness. — Leah Hager Cohen

People cheat when they are afraid. When there is no cost to being wrong or confessing ignorance, there is no reason to cheat or fake comprehension. — Leah Hager Cohen

There is nowhere morning does not go. — Leah Hager Cohen

Food and shelter are very nice, but without stories to hear and tell, we might as well be the walking dead. — Leah Hager Cohen

The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language. — Leah Hager Cohen

That our intuition could lead us astray is troubling in direct proportion to the degree of trust we place in it. The solution would seem to be: Don't be overly trusting. Mix in a healthy dose of skepticism. But suppose we don't have a say in the matter? Suppose we're hardwired to trust - to believe in - our instincts, regardless of whether they're right? Suddenly the problem of not knowing becomes a lot more complicated. — Leah Hager Cohen

In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, community leaders, gossips, and poets. — Leah Hager Cohen

For why are we here if not to try to fathom one another? Not through facts alone, but with the full extent of our imaginations. And what are stories if not tools for imagining? — Leah Hager Cohen

Is there a wrong way to say "I don't know"? Yes. When we declare ignorance, it should be a) honest and b) in the spirit of opening ourselves up to hearing, to learning, to receiving. When we say "I don't know" under these conditions, the words can forge connection, healing, growth. But when we resist or disavow knowledge, when we profess ignorance as a way of donning armor and evading accountability, then we make a mockery of those words, and we rupture connections not only with others but within ourselves, within our souls. — Leah Hager Cohen

In this day ... community has come to mean less a geographic neighborhood than a broader, sketchier network of colleagues and kindred spirits. — Leah Hager Cohen

He spoke slowly; I had a sense he was groping between words for the thread of his own thoughts. — Leah Hager Cohen

The occasion's enormity: The birth of a friendship being no less momentous than the instant of falling in love. — Leah Hager Cohen

Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same. — Leah Hager Cohen

Fakery is a vital currency in our social intercourse. That's not necessarily all bad. A lot of the time we pretend as a way of fortifying or easing connections. When we feign recognition, for example, or delight in seeing someone, or gladness to go out of our way, these are acts of goodwill. At best, pretense can be a form of kindness. — Leah Hager Cohen

Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer. — Leah Hager Cohen

The ability to know one's limitations, to recognize the bounds of one's own comprehension - this is a kind of knowing that approaches wisdom. — Leah Hager Cohen

The one thing that is truly monstrous is the idea of another person being unreachable. I think this is what lies behind our fear of people we imagine to be evil: the belief that they are wholly beyond our reach, beyond our appeal and our compassion, because they have alienated themselves completely from the rest of humanity and thereby rendered themselves inhuman ... But there is mutuality involved. For us to accept another person's alienation is simultaneously to alienate ourselves from him - to become complicit. When we decide to accept that another person is unreachable, we may cut him off, send him away, but we have set ourselves adrift as well. — Leah Hager Cohen

She saw that Ricky had not wheeled the little stool any distance from the bed but sat as close as before, gazing at her with sorrow and without judgment. And now Ricky plucked thoughtfully at her own lip, and drew a breath and gazed hard at the blanket, seeming to lose herself in contemplation of some deep and powerful interest, as though whatever she was working out was not for Jess's sake only. When she looked up she said: 'That might be harder.' [p. 352l — Leah Hager Cohen

We are at the mercy of our own narrative impulses. — Leah Hager Cohen

The Dream Lover is a historical novel at once expansively researched yet intimately imagined. George Sand may be the ultimate Berg heroine. 'A life not lived in truth,' Berg writes, 'is a life forfeited.' In this latest work, Elizabeth Berg has poured her own great gifts and her own great heart into the story of a woman determined to refuse any such forfeiture, no matter the cost. — Leah Hager Cohen

I have an inability to consider a thing without imagining the story behind it as a needful force, a great petitioning weight. — Leah Hager Cohen

Unfortunately, being physically equipped to hear has little to do with the actual predilection to listen. Sharing a common tongue does not ensure earnest or successful communication. Missed connections occur among hearing people all the time, splitting open countless minor chasms and yawning gulches, fissures that no vaccine or technilogical advance will ever be able to mend or prevent. That task will always fail to us. — Leah Hager Cohen

Who could ever tell a story complete? — Leah Hager Cohen

The humor is the sort born of ironic necessity; they use it to salve the wounds in insensitity. — Leah Hager Cohen

The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made. — Leah Hager Cohen

Our civic life is heavily marked - indeed, pocked - by debates in which each side is so certain of its position that any movement is effectively impossible. For that matter, debate - in its original sense of "to consider something, to deliberate" - is impossible. We wind up with so much sound and fury and nothing gained. — Leah Hager Cohen

She glanced over abstractedly, still keeping company with her most recent thought. — Leah Hager Cohen

I have been too fond of stories. — Leah Hager Cohen