Leonard Cohen Quotes

Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique.

No penance serves to renew them, no massive transfusions of trust. Why not even revenge can undo them, so twisted these vows and so crushed.

And what can I tell you, my brother, my killer, what can I possibly say? I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I'm glad you stood in my way

The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave.

Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time

Fare thee well my nightingale, I lived but to be near you. Thow you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you.

Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word.

You have money, fame, youth, beauty, talent. That's a good start ... for feeling good.

Games are nature's most beautiful creation

Music is the emotional life of the most people.

I remember what Ben Jonson said: 'I've studied all the philosophies and all the theologies but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them

How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings

Now I need your hidden love,
I'm cold as a new razor blade.
You left when I told you I was curious…
I never said that I was brave.

from "So Long Marianne

The silver knives are flashing in that tired old cafe ...

Marita,
Please find me,
I am almost 30

When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents' room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction. When the heart grins at itself, the world is destroyed. And I am found alone with the husks and the shells. Then the dangerous moment comes: I am too great to ask for help. I have other hopes. I legislate from the fortress of my disappointments, with a set jaw. Overthrow this even terror with a sweet remembrance: when I was with you, when my soul delighted you, when I was what you wanted. My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terror for one who remembers the Name.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

Love is not a victory march

The winter has not killed usagain!

It's you my love, you who are the stranger.

Going nowhere … isn't about turning your back on the world; it's about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

If I spelled out the Principles of Faith
I would be barking on the moon.

Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession.

I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

I raise my glass to the Awful Truth,
Which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth,
Except to say it isn't worth a dime,
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice,
And it's once for the Devil and once for Christ

A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.

Coroner's inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn't been to the sea-shore in ten years.

THIS ISN'T CHINA

Hold me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don't want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don't want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don't want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Ok I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
in the billion billion needles
I'll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it's a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck kind of morning
it is
and I'll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn't China
nobody's going to eat it
It's just going to get fed and petted
Ok where were we?
Ok go if you must.
I'll create the cosmos
by myself
I'll let it all stick to me
every fucking pine needle
And I'll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that moves across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in the heart
(oh more and more to them)
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly l

Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way?

-You know how to call me
although such a noise now
would only confuse the air
Neither of us can forget
the steps we danced
the words you stretched
to call me out of dust
Yes I long for you
not just as a leaf for weather
or vase for hands
but with a narrow human longing
that makes a man refuse
any fields but his own
I wait for you at an
unexpected place in your journey
like the rusted key
or the feather you do not pick up.-

-I WILL NEVER FIND THE FACES
FOR ALL GOODBYES I'VE MADE.-


For Anyone Dressed in Marble
The miracle we all are waiting for
is waiting till the Parthenon falls down
and House of Birthdays is a house no more
and fathers are unpoisoned by renown.
The medals and the records of abuse
can't help us on our pilgrimage to lust,
but like whips certain perverts never use,
compel our flesh in paralysing trust.
I see an orphan, lawless and serene,
standing in a corner of the sky,
body something like bodies that have been,
but not the scar of naming in his eye.
Bred close to the ovens, he's burnt inside.
Light, wind, cold, dark -- they use him like a bride.


I Had It for a Moment

I had it for a moment
I knew why I must thank you
I saw powerful governing men in black suits
I saw them undressed
in the arms of young mistresses
the men more nake

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.

There is a crack in everything

We've got to learn to love appearances.

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap.

Maybe there's a god above but the only thing I learned from love was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty .

I couldn't feel so I learned to touch.

I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.

I don't know which side is anybody on any more. I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order.

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...

After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

Follow me, the wise man said, but he walked behind.

Nobody goes into a Zen monastery as a tourist.

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.
A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.
A kite is the last poem you've written
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom ... for trying to change the system from within

Only one thing made him happy and now that it was gone everything made him happy.

I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.

Dear friend, I have searched all night
through each burnt paper,
but I fear I will never find
the formula to let you die

The crumbs of love that you offer me
They're the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential here
It's just the shadow, shadow of my wound

There's no forsaking what you love
no existential leap
as witnessed here in time and blood
a thousand kisses deep

His vision was just outstanding. If you think of him in the same way as Pele then you would come close.

The duty of lovers is to tarnish the Golden Rule

Your body will never be familiar.

Except for a couple of hours
in the morning
which I passed in the company
of a sage
I stayed in bed
without food
only a few mouthfuls of water
"you are a fine looking old man"
I said to myself in the mirror
"and what is more
you have the correct attitude
You don't care if it ends
or if it goes on
And as for the women
and the music
there will be plenty of that
in Paradise"
Then I went to the Mosque
of Memory
to express my gratitude

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.

I'm blackening pages, but I don't know if it's writing.

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.

When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

War is wonderful. They'll never stamp it out. It's one of the few times people can act their best. It's so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother.

The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.

And she comes to his hand
but she's not really tame
she longs to be lost,
he longs for the same.

Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.

I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

Each day he lugged
a hunk of something precious
over to his boredom
and once or twice a week
when he was granted
the tiny grace of distance
he perceived that he laboured
as his fathers did
on someone else's pyramid
Thoughts of rebellion
Thoughts of injustice
New Year's resolutions
The seduction of a woman
All these he engraved
numbly letter by letter
Walther PPK-S
Serial No. 115142
stolen from one slave by another

I salute you
Brave spirit
Who has swallowed so much
And tasted so little.

I showed my heart to the doctor/
He said I just had to quit

Here's to the few who forgive what you do, and the fewer who don't even care

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a
real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but
one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and
changed into itself over and over.

I loved you for a long, long time
I know this love is real
It don't matter how it all went wrong
That don't change the way I feel
And I can't believe that time's
Gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of
There ain't no cure for love

And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.

Pay attention to the cracks, because that's where the light gets in.

I dreamed about you baby. It was just the other night. Most of you was naked Ah, but some of you was light.

I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

A rat is more alive than a turtle.
A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn't count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin

History is a needle
for putting men asleep
anointed with the poison
Of all they want to keep.

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

Ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars

To a Young Nun

This undemanding love
that our staggered births
have purchased for us -
You in your generation,
I in mine.
I am not the one
you are looking for.
You are not the one
I've stopped looking for.
How sweetly time
disposes of us
as we go arm in arm
over the Bridge of Details:
Your turn to chop.
My turn to cook.
Your turn to die for love.
My turn to resurrect.

I am this thing that needs to sing.

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

I walk through the old yellow sunlight
to get to my kitchen table
the poem about me
lying there with the books
in which I am listed
among the dead and future Dylans

I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me, but the room just filled up with mosquitoes.

A heavy burden lifted from my soul,
I heard that love was out of my control.

My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.

To discover the truth in anything that is alien, first dispense with the indispensable in your own vision.

Well I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.

Pigskin crackling on my thumb, nummy nummy I hate pain.

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

Everytime you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory

It's a pity if someone ... has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart's ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.

It's four in the morning, the end of december
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.

Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked
By the winds of change and the weeds of sex
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's closing time.

In My Secret Life"
"I saw you this morning,
you were moving so fast.
Can't seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much,
there's no one in sight.
And we're still making love
In my secret life.
I smile when I am angry,
I cheat and I lie,
I do what I have to do
to get by,
In my secret life.

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