How to Live. What to Do Quotes

“Part of the problem is that we’re trapped inside our own heads, unable to see ourselves from the outside. This accounts for why we’re so much more adept at pointing out the habitual mistakes of others than our own. Here, fiction can help in ways real-life experience usually can’t. What the best fiction does—which is also, hopefully, what the psychoanalyst would do—is help us to experience the same errors and illusions from the inside rather than to view them from on high, to enter the world of the person who made them for long enough to understand why.”
― Josh Cohen, How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature

“What if, instead of searching vainly for an elusive entity ahead of us, we stopped at something in front of us, and rested, and listened?”
― Josh Cohen, How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature