Top 40 Jon Cohen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You keep the lights on in a library the same way you keep the lights on in the emergency of a hospital.”

— Jon Cohen

2. “The Grum’s Ledger is a tale of regret. In real life, there was no happy ending. Alexander Grum died alone because he was afraid to seize love and risk and all the unknowns that go with it. He chose certainty- and it was his ruin.”

— Jon Cohen

3. “Ordinarily, when the great oak doors groaned open and someone entered Prat Library there would be a burst of sunlight, a bright harsh intrusion on the dim and quiet. But when Oriana Jeffers came through the doors, the light transmuted into moonbeams and star-shimmer, and all the books on the shelves fluttered awake. Oh joy, they whispered, a READER.”

— Jon Cohen

4. “What is a library, but a temple of truth? What other function do books have, the great ones, but to change the reader? Books to comfort. But most of all, books to disturb you forward.”

— Jon Cohen

5. “Why did you wink at me?” he asked. She turned. “Because I love a good story.”

— Jon Cohen

6. “Harry lay in the tree house. He did not want to hear Wolf’s voice. On the other hand, to not hear Wolf’s voice always held the threat that a silent Wolf was creeping close. Purely psychological, because Wolf could not be close.”

— Jon Cohen

7. “This imagined future. It was unbearably beautiful.”

— Jon Cohen

8. “It’s only five words long – she died a year ago. And I’m out here to say goodbye. Which turns out to be a long and complicated process. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish saying it.”

— Jon Cohen

9. “Rules are important in fairy tales.”

— Jon Cohen

10. “That’s a lot of plot in one sentence, dear.”

— Jon Cohen

11. “The Grum’s Ledger is a tale of regret. In real life, there was no happy ending. Alexander Grum died alone because he was afraid to seize love and risk all the unknowns that go with it. He chose certainty – and it was his ruin. “The only guarantee I could offer him – against all the unknowns, all the obstacles – was that we would face life together.”

— Jon Cohen

12. “Pine sap is antiseptic, astringent, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial. Best damn Band-Aid in the world, Harry, remember that.”

— Jon Cohen

13. “You know what’s even more magic than a fairy tale?” Harry said. “Real life.”

— Jon Cohen

14. “A quality that always amazed him about trees: the constancy of their temperature. In winter, trees are never cold to the touch, and in summer they give off no acquired solar heat. It spoke to their essential aliveness. They were not rocks growing warm in the midday sun or streams that froze over; they were as self-regulating as the human body. It was a small leap to imagine that trees had souls.”

— Jon Cohen

15. “Unlucky is a kind of magic.”

— Jon Cohen

16. “What else is a library, but a temple of truth? What other function do books have, the great ones, but to change the reader?”

— Jon Cohen

17. “You can always count on a tree to get you through, Harry.” The old professor dabbed the sap onto his cut, and almost immediately, the slow bleeding stopped. “Pine sap is antiseptic, astringent, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial. Best damn Band-Aid in the world, Harry, remember that.”

— Jon Cohen

18. “By its very nature, though, love is tragic. You can’t protect it. No matter how tightly you hold on to the one you love, they leave you or you leave them. That’s what life is, loving and letting go. I am so grateful to those two young lovers of sixty years ago. I am so grateful to have tasted love. But all love ends tragically. Because, tragically, love always ends. What a heartbreaking and wondrous conundrum! Whether you have it just a few weeks, or years, or your entire life – always, it ends.”

— Jon Cohen

19. “Because that’s why we’re here on this planet. You know? To speak to dogs. To be alive in the world.”

— Jon Cohen

20. “Reading solves most things. Or at least assuages the heart.”

— Jon Cohen

21. “The world does what the world does.”

— Jon Cohen

22. “Oriana loved how Olive trusted her. Most grown-ups don’t know how to trust children.”

— Jon Cohen

23. “Perhaps it was the reason dogs had been invented – to add spectacular craziness to the world.”

— Jon Cohen

24. “And special makes people a little scared of you.”

— Jon Cohen

25. “To every story we bring the story of ourselves.”

— Jon Cohen

26. “Why does the universe allow love to happen? Against such odds – death, abandonment, and a thousand other misfortunes and ordeals – why would we risk falling in love? When it can be snatched from us at any time for any reason?”

— Jon Cohen

27. “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.”

— Jon Cohen

28. “As he drifted into sleep, Harry’s thoughts were uncluttered, peaceful, ordinary. A hickory is windfirm, he thought. A white ash is strong against sudden shock. The sap of a Norway spruce binds a wound. He slept.”

— Jon Cohen

29. “Because that’s how the world is saved. Piece by piece, every day. Somebody like you has to step up. Somebody like you has to be wonderful.”

— Jon Cohen

30. “And she knew from her year-long education, her immersion in all the possible tales that ever were – that only half of them ended in happily-ever-after. In the other half children died, evil prevailed, knights in shining armor succumbed to poisoned arrows, the forest turned impenetrable.”

— Jon Cohen

31. “Is everything a story to you?” Harry called after her. “Absolutely!” came Olive’s voice. “I’m a librarian, dear!”

— Jon Cohen

32. “Because it’s worth it. Worth the risk and the pain. Of all the glorious enchantments of this world – spring, snow, laughter, red roses, dogs, books – love is by far the best.”

— Jon Cohen

33. “Pine sap is antiseptic, astringent, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial.”

— Jon Cohen

34. “Because it’s worth it. Worth the risk and the pain. Of all the glorious enchantments of this world – spring, snow, laughter, red roses, dogs, books – love is by far the best.” She released Harry and got down off the low stone wall. She took in the sugar maple, the wall, the forest. Hugged herself and smiled sorrowfully. “By its very nature, though, love is tragic. You can’t protect it. No matter how tightly you hold on to the one you love, they leave you or you leave them.”

— Jon Cohen

35. “What a terrible thing you will carry inside you for the rest of your life. I forgive you, but you will never forgive yourself.”

— Jon Cohen

36. “Because youth itself is beautiful.”

— Jon Cohen

37. “This is what fairy tales have always been for, to guide children through the scary parts of their lives.”

— Jon Cohen

38. “Tremble not. Cry not. Persevere against all obstacles. Climb the trees, walk the stone walls, play in the creek, go into the forest.”

— Jon Cohen

39. “You had to pay very close attention. Everything meant something. Something could mean everything.”

— Jon Cohen

40. “There are no guarantees, except that every morning, the sun will rise. No matter what happens, good or bad, each day will be followed by a new day.”

— Jon Cohen

41. “Amanda had a wicked case of widow-fatigue.”

— Jon Cohen

42. “He didn’t know kids, but he knew that Oriana was a fellow traveler. It scared him, it really did, but he sensed that, inexplicably, she needed something only he could provide. Winter was over, but spring had not yet come for him and Oriana. They were between uncharted seasons, at the cusp of change, but only at the cusp. He didn’t know kids, but he supposed that sometimes a kid needed something she couldn’t find at home, but only in the wild of the forest.”

— Jon Cohen

43. “The world had not ended. Watching the sun from her window, young Olive thought, Now I understand how life works. There are no guarantees, except that every morning, the sun will rise. No matter what happens, good or bad, each day will be followed by a new day.”

— Jon Cohen

44. “Olive was all the best things: she was incredibly wrinkly and smelled like pipe tobacco and she had a sudden laugh that scared the spit out of you and she hated the computer, but she’d use it to search the ends of Susquehanna County for an interlibrary-loan copy of the book you wanted if Pratt Library didn’t have it on its shelves. Also, she used curse words.”

— Jon Cohen

45. “She’s the ultimate reader. And quite the opposite of rule-bound.”

— Jon Cohen

46. “You’re so tangled up in endings,” Ronnie said, gesturing at the scattered books and fallen bookshelves, “you forgot about your beginnings. Think of all the beginnings that began right here, in this magic place.”

— Jon Cohen

47. “The autopsy revealed that Dean’s right cerebral artery had burst. “Daddy was strong, but he had a tiny weak spot there was no way of knowing about,” Amanda said. She took out an old nursing textbook and showed Oriana a drawing of the vasculature of the brain. “Right in there, that’s the place, do you see?” Oriana nodding yes, but not allowing the medical facts to impede her father’s imminent return as an angel.”

— Jon Cohen

48. “Amanda squinted in the wind, then reflexively turned her mind as if it were a physical thing she could grab and point in another direction.”

— Jon Cohen