Top 100 Quotes About Leonard Cohen
#2. I would love to work with Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, B.B. King. I'd love to do something with Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane, and The Last Shadow Puppets. If I got a call from Juliette Lewis or PJ Harvey, or Chrissie Hynde, that'd be a thrill.
Imelda May
#3. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.
Leonard Cohen
#4. A fresh spiderweb
billowing
like a spinnaker
across the open window
and here he is
the little master
sailing by
on a thread of milk
wish me luck
admiral
I haven't finished anything
in a long time
Leonard Cohen
#5. We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.
Leonard Cohen
#6. So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.
Leonard Cohen
#7. Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm
Leonard Cohen
#9. I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me, but the room just filled up with mosquitoes.
Leonard Cohen
#10. There are no letters in the mailbox
And there are no grapes upon the vine
And there are no chocolates in your boxes anymore
And there are no diamonds in the mine
Leonard Cohen
#11. He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair.
Leonard Cohen
#12. The candles burned The moon went down The polished hill The milky town Transparent, weightless, luminous Uncovering the two of us On that fundamental ground Where love's unwilled, unleashed, unbound And half the perfect world is found.
Leonard Cohen
#13. It doesn't matter what you do because it's going to happen anyway.
Leonard Cohen
#14. Maybe there's a god above but the only thing I learned from love was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.
Leonard Cohen
#15. Listen to a name so private it can burn hear it said aloud and learn and learn History is a needle for putting men asleep anointed with the poison of all they want to keep Now
Leonard Cohen
#16. I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.
Leonard Cohen
#17. Hallelujah"
"Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof.
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair,
she broke your throne, and she cut your hair.
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah ...
Leonard Cohen
#18. String Reprise / Treaty
I wish there was a treaty we could sign
It's over now, the water and the wine
We were broken then but now we're borderline
And I wish there was a treaty,
I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine
Leonard Cohen
#19. My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.
Leonard Cohen
#20. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#21. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#22. It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender
Leonard Cohen
#23. This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.
Leonard Cohen
#24. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#25. One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload
Leonard Cohen
#26. A heavy burden lifted from my soul,
I heard that love was out of my control.
Leonard Cohen
#27. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.
Leonard Cohen
#28. As a bit of loner, prone to melancholy, with a questionable sexuality, I found great solace in the words of-Dylan, Joni, John Prine and Leonard Cohen. The darker the better.
Jill Sobule
#29. I would like to remind the management that the drinks are watered and the hat-check girl has syphilis and the band is composed of former ss monsters However since it is new year's eve and i have lip cancer i will place my paper hat on my concussion and dance
Leonard Cohen
#30. He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.
Leonard Cohen
#31. I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.
Leonard Cohen
#32. Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation - none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.
Leonard Cohen
#33. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#34. We do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity.
Leonard Cohen
#36. What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.
Leonard Cohen
#37. 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
Leonard Cohen
#38. Pay attention to the cracks, because that's where the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
#39. The first star tonight insanely high, virgin, calm.
I have one hour of peace before the documented planets burn me down.
Leonard Cohen
#40. I have often prayed for you like this Let me have her
Leonard Cohen
#41. If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.
Leonard Cohen
#42. Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2.
Alain De Botton
#43. Silence And a deeper silence When the crickets Hesitate
Leonard Cohen
#44. Well it's true, ever since I stopped eating meat I feel a lot better among animals, I feel I can be much more honest when I pat a dog.
Leonard Cohen
#45. I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
Leonard Cohen
#47. My animal howls
My angel's upset
But I'm not allowed
A trace of regret
Leonard Cohen
#48. The moon is swimming naked and the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief.
Leonard Cohen
#50. Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...
Leonard Cohen
#51. How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.
Leonard Cohen
#52. Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
Leonard Cohen
#53. Take one step to the side and it's all absurd.
Leonard Cohen
#55. Here's to the few who forgive what you do, and the fewer who don't even care
Leonard Cohen
#56. Leonard Cohen can give you "Leonard Cohen" - the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote - Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist "Tom Waits" the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed.
Sylvie Simmons
#57. Sexuality is general, and although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warm. That's the great generosity of women and the great generosity of the creator who worked it out that way, that there are no unilateral agreements of sexuality.
Leonard Cohen
#58. Sail on, sail on, o' might Ship of State. To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate. Sail on, sail on, sail on.
Leonard Cohen
#59. I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong, I will make it all up to thee.
Leonard Cohen
#60. This mental space is occupied and everything is mine.
Leonard Cohen
#61. And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.
Leonard Cohen
#62. If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask.
If you want a different kind of love I'll wear a mask.
If you want to strike me down in anger here I stand.
If you want a partner in life take my hand.
I'm your man.
Leonard Cohen
#63. I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#64. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#65. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / Thats how it goes / Everybody knows.
Leonard Cohen
#66. As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
Leonard Cohen
#67. Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms
Leonard Cohen
#68. I'm blackening pages, but I don't know if it's writing.
Leonard Cohen
#70. We're in a world where there's famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it's very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?
Leonard Cohen
#71. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#72. I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.
Leonard Cohen
#73. His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs (he ate free at almost every soda fountain in the city), and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis which, for some reason, he had coated with red nail polish.
Leonard Cohen
#74. I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk. Took my diamond to the pawn shop, but that don't make it junk.
Leonard Cohen
#75. First of all nothing will happen
and a little later
nothing will happen again
Leonard Cohen
#76. Now Suzanne takes your hand
and she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
on our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
among the garbage and the flowers
Leonard Cohen
#77. I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
Leonard Cohen
#78. You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.
Leonard Cohen
#79. Though I love your company, your instructions are wasted her. I will always choose the woman who caries me off, I will always sit with the family of loneliness.
Leonard Cohen
#81. I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
Leonard Cohen
#82. Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time
Leonard Cohen
#83. You know, Leonard Cohen is amazing, just a mastermind, and really one of the great geniuses of our time.
Jake Shimabukuro
#84. The most precious secret has been leaked:
There is no Opposition!
Leonard Cohen
#85. The silver knives are flashing in that tired old cafe ...
Leonard Cohen
#86. ...And everything depends upon how near you sleep to me.
Leonard Cohen
#88. You came to me this morning
And you handled me like meat
You'd have to be a man to know
How good that feels, how sweet
Leonard Cohen
#89. 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
Leonard Cohen
#90. All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them
Leonard Cohen
#91. We sold ourselves for love but now we are free
I'm so sorry for that ghost I made you be
Only one of us was real and that was me
Leonard Cohen
#92. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#93. Who could have foretold
the heart grows old
from touching others
Leonard Cohen
#94. I dreamed about you baby. It was just the other night. Most of you was naked Ah, but some of you was light.
Leonard Cohen
#95. I didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through
Leonard Cohen
#96. We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.
Leonard Cohen
#97. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#98. I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates.
Leonard Cohen
#99. A man never got a woman back ... not by begging on his knees.
Leonard Cohen
#100. I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
Leonard Cohen
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