Leah Hager Cohen > Quotes

“There is nowhere morning does not go.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

“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, Heart, You Bully, You Punk

“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, Heart, You Bully, You Punk

“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, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

“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, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

“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, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“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, Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight

“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, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“The ignorance we’re ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“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, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“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, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World

“We are at the mercy of our own narrative impulses.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“I have been too fond of stories.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“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 Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater

“The involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World

“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, The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater

“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, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“The occasion's enormity: The birth of a friendship being no less momentous than the instant of falling in love.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“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, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“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.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“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, I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance

“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.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“She glanced over abstractedly, still keeping company with her most recent thought.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“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.”
― 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, House Lights

“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.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“A dry little laugh at the grotesquerie of using this stock phrase. At having occasion to use it.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“Diggs lubricated her skepticism with diplomacy.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Strangers and Cousins

“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.”
― Leah Hager Cohen

“The easy danger of stories, their adhesive allure.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World