Quotes from Leonard Cohen

We are ugly but we have the music.

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.

When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

She was made of flesh and eyelashes.

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.

Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.

I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I'm just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep.

Your body will never be familiar.

ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars

The sweetest little song: You go your way I'll go your way too!

I almost went to bed without remembering the four white violets I put in the button-hole of your green sweater and how i kissed you then and you kissed me shy as though I'd never been your lover

A sip of wine, a cigarette, And then it's time to go. I tidied up the kitchenette; I tuned the old banjo. I'm wanted at the traffic-jam. They're saving me a seat.

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of Dance me to the end of love

When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want to summon the eyes and hidden mouths of stone and light and water to testify against you.

Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms

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.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, Everybody knows that the war is over, Everybody knows the good guys lost.

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.

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

You go to Heaven once you've been to Hell

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.

It's a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too.

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos... So ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.