Quotes from Leah Hager Cohen

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

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

There is nowhere morning does not go.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ignorance we're ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy.

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.

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.

I have been too fond of stories.

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

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

We are at the mercy of our own narrative impulses.

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

No less romantically than Rapunzel in her tower pined for rescue did I pine for this idealized being, a kind of alternate me, a me outside of me. A shining one who would somehow at once be my familiar, my deepest intimate, and at the same time exist thrillingly apart.

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.

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.

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.

The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language.

She glanced over abstractedly, still keeping company with her most recent thought.

Sifting through the sieve of branches, a dusting of sugar over the cereal of dead leaves. An inch of snow accumulated through the night: slow, slow confectioners' sugar coming down through the thick limbs of fir and maple and oak.

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.