Quotes from Leah Hager Cohen

Wally gives gifts all the time, at the drop of a hat, little, odd ones. The gift not so much in the item itself as in the transaction, the act of passing something along.

In some ways I think every wrong turn I was to make . . . could be traced to moments of inaction, moments when I noticed things unfolding wrongly and failed to query or object.

Diggs lubricated her skepticism with diplomacy.

Such a leaky emotion, jealousy, it always showed through, like grease on a paper bag.

All their antics have left them far from tired, though, to judge by the way they are dominating the conversation, with great animation and an unsortable pidgin of academic-use mixed with hipster jargon.

yet Bennie, like most highly defended people, is total mush beneath the carapace.

We are none of us free. We are tethered by our connections to other people, those we know as well as those we will never meet. What tethers us is our ability our responsibility to imagine them, to fathom their lives, their circumstances, what we have in common, and what sets us apart.

The words came fast and slow, because the act of writing plunged me so wantonly down slippery avenues of thought that frequently I found myself not writing at all, my mouth open on a half-formed word with which my hand had been unable to keep pace and from which my mind had careened many seconds or whole minutes earlier like a horse having thrown its rider.

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

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

Always, even on a solemn occasion like this, an undercurrent of laughter in her voice. She possessed a keen sense of the fundamental absurdity of life.

If her mind has a glittery radiance, mine is dark and loamy, preternaturally attuned to sorrow.

A dry little laugh at the grotesquerie of using this stock phrase. At having occasion to use it.

To feel forever inadequate: Is this simply the universal condition of being a father?

Every healthy person hungers. To know things for himself. Form his own questions, test his own ideas. Funny how a person's own family is often the first to punish him for that.

How eagerly the words spring into shape, winding themselves around a rigid latticework of meaning like the curling tendrils of ivy that crisscross my window. The skeletal branches, whose intricate fretwork clings to the screen, hold tight against a lashing wind and pelting rain.

The story and every element of it . . . had been fixed long ago . . . we had literally fought to establish a single ritualized version, constant enough to double for fact. Until Tilly changed a phrase. . . . I ought to have been indignant, ought to have piped up righteously in a high, clear voice. . . . But I couldn't say it, and so made myself complicit. Tilly was the one who broke the rule' I was the one who left her.

The easy danger of stories, their adhesive allure.

It was the tiniest scrap of misinformation, insignificant really. But. . . . That was not the story at all.

A dilemma arises when the interests of these deaf adults seem at odds with those of the schoolchildren—for instance, when satisfying the wishes of the former means providing inadequate services to the latter. Some would argue that because hearing people have always controlled the definition of adequacy, that concept is invalid. Others hold that any deaf candidate is preferable to a hearing candidate for a position working with deaf children.

She wanted to say in a voice thick and passionate, "you're so wrong", but what was the point of saying that when they didn't realize their rules were only that, their rules, and not some absolute, pre-existing creed that was their mission to interpret and protect?

Theater is like the leopards, Clem told Diggs. It disrupts the status quo, she tried. Until its ideas bring about lasting change by getting incorporated in society. Maybe. Diggs lubricated her skepticism with diplomacy. She's good at that. But if we're talking expedience, law has it all over art, bambina.