Quotes from Sylvie Simmons

What I mean by depression isn't just the blues, it's not just like a hangover from the weekend,or the girl didn't show up or something like that" said Leonard describing the paralyzing darkness and anxiety he experienced. "It's kind of a mental violence that stops you functioning from one moment from the next" Leonard took the spending "a lot of time alone. Dying." He said "letting myself slowly die

I had wonderful love but I did not give back wonderful love, I was unable to reply to their love. Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation, I couldn't touch the thing that was offered to me,and it was offered to me everywhere.

He wrote how he "needed to be by himself, so he could miss her, to get some perspective

It was so much more exquisite to long for somebody than to have her there beside him.

I don't know which side everybody's on any more, and 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. It doesn't mean that I don't wish you courage in your struggle. There are on both sides of this struggle men of goodwill. That is important to remember, some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety.

When something was said in a certain kind of way, it seemed to embrace the cosmos. It's not just my heart, but every heart was involved, and the loneliness was dissolved, and you felt that you were this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.

You finish listening to a song of Leonard's and you know he's said everything he had to say, he didn't let the song go till he was done with it.

In his view, the ancient Japanese way, where men would meet and "bow to each other for as much as half an hour speaking words of greeting, gradually moving closer together, understanding the necessity of entering another's consciousness carefully,"1 was a good one.

It's the first time I've really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself I prefer the Twist."1

Genius, Layton said, is "the ability—a very rare ability—to see things as they actually are. You are not fooled.

Let me never speak casually.

Live Songs, he said, represented "a very confused and

Jedes Gedicht, das dich berührt, ist wie ein Ruf, der eine Reaktion erfordert, und man möchte mit seiner eigenen Geschichte antworten.

There would be a book tour too, he said, and he wanted Marianne to come with him. "Mahalia Jackson is on the record player, I'm right there with her, flying with you in that glory, pulling away the shrouds from the sun, making music out of everything." Man he wrote a mean letter. The telegram he sent was shorter but equally effective: "Have a flat. All I need is my woman and her child." Marianne packed two suitcases and flew with Axel to Montreal.

If I'm not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when? But if I'm only for myself, who am I?

Thirty-nine years later the spellbinding performance was released, along with Lerner's footage, on the CD/DVD Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. A