Cohen Brown Quotes

There’s a quote that I share every time I talk about vulnerability and perfectionism. My fixation with these words from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” comes from how much comfort and hope they give me as I put “enough” into practice: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

The old know that no matter what you looked like when you were young—even if you wore tortoiseshell glasses and had mousy brown hair—you were beautiful. Because youth itself is beautiful.

Spices are like colors: if you mix them all together you get a taste that is akin to the colors black, dark brown, or grey. But if you mix spices judiciously and sparingly—as you would mix yellow and blue to make green—you get a wholly unexpected and beautiful flavor.

JINGLE To show the fat brain rotting like stumps of brown teeth in an old bright throat is the final clever thrill of summer lads all dead with love. So here is mine, torn and stretched for the sun, to be used for a drum or a tambourine, to be scratched with poetry by Kafka’s machine

Get Inspired: Most of us are trying to live an authentic life. Deep down, we want to take off our game face and be real and imperfect. There is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that serves as a reminder to me when I get into that place where I’m trying to control everything and make it perfect.6 The line is, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So many of us run around spackling all of the cracks, trying to make everything look just right. This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript and the too-tight jeans). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.

My eye keeps escaping towards the big blue lacquered door that I've had painted in a trompe-l'oeil on the back wall. I would like to call Mrs. Cohen back and tell her there's no problem for her son's bar mitzvah, everything's ready: I would like to go through that door and disappear into the garden my mind's eye has painted behind it. The grass there is soft and sweet, there are bulrushes bowing along the banks of a river. I put lime trees in it, hornbeams, weeping elms, blossoming cherries and liquidambars. I plant it with ancient roses, daffodils, dahlias with their melancholy heavy heads, and flowerbeds of forget-me-nots. Pimpernels, armed with all the courage peculiar to such tiny entities, follow the twists and turns between the stones of a rockery. Triumphant artichokes raise their astonished arrows towards the sky. Apple trees and lilacs blossom at the same time as hellebores and winter magnolias. My garden knows no seasons. It is both hot and cool. Frost goes hand in hand with a shimmering heat haze. The leaves fall and grow again. row and fall again. Wisteria climbs voraciously over tumbledown walls and ancient porches leading to a boxwood alley with a poignant fragrance. The heady smell of fruit hangs in the air. Huge peaches, chubby-cheeked apricots, jewel-like cherries, redcurrants, raspberries, spanking red tomatoes and bristly cardoons feast on sunlight and water, because between the sunbeams it rains in rainbow-colored droplets. At the very end, beyond a painted wooden fence, is a woodland path strewn with brown leaves, protected from the heat of the skies by a wide parasol of foliage fluttering in the breeze. You can't see the end of it, just keep walking, and breathe.

• The trick to staying out of resentment is maintaining better boundaries—blaming others less and holding myself more accountable for asking for what I need and want. • There is no integrity in blaming and turning to “it’s not fair” and “I deserve.” I need to take responsibility for my own well-being. If I believed I was not being treated fairly or not getting something I deserved, was I actually asking for it, or was I just looking for an excuse to assign blame and feel self-righteous? • I am trying not to numb my discomfort for myself, because I think I’m worth the effort. It’s not something that’s happening to me—it’s something I’m choosing for myself. • This rumble taught me why self-righteousness is dangerous. Most of us buy into the myth that it’s a long fall from “I’m better than you” to “I’m not good enough”—but the truth is that these are two sides of the same coin. Both are attacks on our worthiness. We don’t compare when we’re feeling good about ourselves; we look for what’s good in others. When we practice self-compassion, we are compassionate toward others. Self-righteousness is just the armor of self-loathing. In Daring Greatly, I talk about how the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah”—“Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah”—capture how daring greatly can feel more like freedom with a little battle fatigue than a full-on celebration. The same is true for rising strong. What

the GSG is mobilizing two Education Outcomes Funds, each of $1 billion, to improve educational attainment levels. One of them is in Africa and the Middle East, in partnership with the Education Commission chaired by Gordon Brown, and the other is in India, alongside the smaller Outcome Fund recently launched by the British Asian Trust.

Work is associated with meaningfulness when it possesses one or more of four key attributes: (1) The work has an important positive impact on the well-being of human beings (Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003; Grant, 2008; Grant et al., 2007). (2) The work is associated with an important virtue or a personal value (Bright, Cameron, & Caza, 2006; Weber, 1992). (3) The work has an impact that extends beyond the immediate time frame or creates a ripple effect (Cameron & Lavine, 2006; Crocker, Nuer, Olivier, & Cohen, 2006). (4) The work builds supportive relationships or a sense of community in people (Polodny, Khurana, & Hill-Popper, 2005; Rousseau, 1992).

Susan Sontag, one of Rushdie’s most loyal defenders, Daniel Pipes, an American conservative, and, later, Kenan Malik, a British historian of the struggles for free speech, all noticed the dangers of London and Washington’s stance. They were telling Muslim democrats, free-thinkers, feminists and liberals that human rights were Western rights, and not for brown-skinned people from a clashing ‘civilisation’. You can call this cultural relativism, but ‘racism’ is a blunter and better word.

The most unjustly rewarded executives in the world had wrecked Western economies and shown no willingness to change their ways. Yet it never occurred to the supposedly liberal-left governments of Barack Obama and Gordon Brown to provide incentives to allow employees to speak up and speak truthfully, or to impose penalties on those who stayed silent.

It never occurred to Brown that a genocide comparable to Rwanda had taken place in Darfur in western Sudan in 2003, and the wired world had done nothing to stop it.

He was the ideal undercover agent for Western intelligence, Rafsanjani announced – ‘a person who seemingly comes from India and who apparently is separate from the Western world and who has a misleading name’. Rushdie was a white colonialist, hiding beneath a brown skin; a traitor hiding behind a Muslim name. The British secret service had paid him to betray the faithful, the Iranian theocracy explained as it added corruption to the list of charges against him. It gave him bribes, disguised as book advances, as it organised the assault on Islam by the cunning if curious means of a magical realist novel.

I want my new friends and my old friends to get together,' she said, 'so we're going to have a shoe dance. All the guys take off one shoe and put it in the middle of the floor. All the girls pick a shoe, find its mate, and dance with the fellow who's wearing it.' Without a second's hesitation, I glanced over at Billy. He was standing next to Sally at the victrola. His saddle shoes were black and white, not brown and white, and very dirty. I memorized the dirt.

author of the national bestseller Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, which won the 2013 Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the CBC’s Canada Reads and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), was hailed as “essential reading” by the Globe and Mail and “brilliant” by The Walrus. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction as well as the Trillium Book Award, Brown won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Al-Solaylee, a two-time finalist for a National Magazine Award, won a gold medal for his column in Sharp in 2019.

But the most important recruit was Lord Nathan Rothschild, who had gained complete control of the Bank of England. Lord Rothschild was the leading member of the world’s most influential banking families. The Rothschilds had established financial ties to such countries as Austria, Germany, Russia, Italy, France, Egypt, China, South Africa, China, India, New Zealand, and Australia. In the process, they established close relations with other Jewish banking families, including the Cohens, Warburgs, Schiffs, Kuhns, Loebs, Lazards, Lehmans, and Goldmans. These families worked together, shared resources, and engaged in joint business ventures. They shared a common Jewish heritage, maintained close social ties,

What do you mean—can’t! What are you fellows up to? Callie, Frank says he can’t come!” Through the back window of the jalopy, Frank caught sight of the sparkling brown eyes and pretty face of his favorite date, Callie Shaw. “Don’t give us that!” Phil Cohen, another friend, stuck his head above the old car’s roof on the other side. “What’ll we do?” Frank asked his brother. “Joe, Iola Morton’s expecting you!” Tony shouted coaxingly. “We’ll go,” Joe decided. “But we can’t stay long.

Ruth was three years old when her sister was born. Like most firstborn children, Ruth assumed her younger sibling would be a miniature version of herself. She would have straight hair, brown eyes, and a soft, gentle voice. She would love books and numbers, and the two of them would be inseparable. It didn’t take long for Ruth to realize her mistake.

Only a woman who’d done what she’d done could appreciate the danger I was in. So enjoy this food, her brown eyes seemed to say, enjoy this music, enjoy this cigarette. I might never see you again. It’s a quintessentially Israeli attitude: Let’s seize the moment now; let’s live right now.

Mrs. Cohen cooked, too- beef stew that had simmered all day, pancakes that weren't pancakes but a combination of potatoes and onions and warmth that floated through the apartment and snuck into the pockets of his coat. And something she called a kugel, its name as playful as the smell of vanilla and sugar and cinnamon that came from the oven. But Al's favorite thing about being with Mrs. Cohen was Friday night. When he arrived, the apartment would be filled with the fragrance of chicken soup and there was always fresh-baked bread, its surface brown and glistening, lying in a fancy braid across the counter.

In the song “Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen writes, “Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” Love is a form of vulnerability and if you replace the word love with vulnerability in that line, it’s just as true.

Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” comes from how much comfort and hope they give me as I put “enough” into practice: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.