Leah Hager Cohen Quotes

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

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

Who could ever tell a story complete?

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

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.

There is nowhere morning does not go.

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.

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

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

I have been too fond of stories.

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.

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.

We are at the mercy of our own narrative impulses.

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.