No Book but the World Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“He spoke slowly; I had a sense he was groping between words for the thread of his own thoughts.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“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.”
― 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

“If her mind has a glittery radiance, mine is dark and loamy, preternaturally attuned to sorrow.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“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

“I have an inability to consider a thing without imagining the story behind it as a needful force, a great petitioning weight.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

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

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