Leonard Cohen Quotes

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

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.

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.

... 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

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.

There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

first of all nothing will happen
and a little later
nothing will happen again

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

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.

At first first nothing will happen to us
and later on
it will happen to us again.

Who could have foretold
the heart grows old
from touching others

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

Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.

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

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

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

Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore

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.

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

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