Leah Hager Cohen Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

Who could ever tell a story complete?

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.

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.

There is nowhere morning does not go.

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?