Quotes from Leonard Cohen

I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.

You should go from place to place recovering the poems that have been written for you to which you can affix your signature. Don't discuss these matters with anyone. Retrieve. Retrieve. When the basket is full someone will appear to whom you can present it.

you wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent

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....

Love is the only engine of survival

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.

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

I know she is coming I know she will look And that is the longing And this is the book.

Undertow" "I set out one night When the tide was low There were signs in the sky But I did not know I'd be caught in the grip Of the undertow Ditched on a beach Where the sea hates to go With a child in my arms And a chill in my soul And my heart the shape Of a begging bowl

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.

It doesn't matter how anything happens.

My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character.

In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.

I will not be held like a drunkard / under the cold tap of facts

Who could have foretold the heart grows old from touching others

Stunned and still not suffering. Swollen with care and anxiety and still not suffering. Useless, old and full of grief, but still not suffering.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth One more thin gypsy thief Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes I thought it was there for good so I never tried. And Jane came by with a lock of your hair She said that you gave it to her That night that you planned to go clear

I am not the one who loved, it's love that chooses me. When hatred with it's package comes, you forbid delivery.

It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.

Maybe there's a God above, As for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight, It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.

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

Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.

Believe nothing of me except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own.

GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me