Leonard Cohen Quotes - Page 13

I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen.

I don't have a television set up [in the mountains], of course, but I find I don't miss it at all, or the newspaper. I've sneaked a radio into by cabin, but I find I turn it on very rarely.

The moon is swimming naked and the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief.

He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair.

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.

Maybe we, the cultural workers , could apply ourselves. We're not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data.

I finally broke into the prison I found my place in the chain Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

I have nothing against the Queen of England. Even in my heart I never resented her for not being Jackie Kennedy. She is, to my mind, a very gallant lady, victimized by whoever it is who designs the tops of her uniforms.

It's hard to be serious about so many things. [Look at the whole emphasis] on the charts, if you're a songwriter.

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

[Patrick Leonard] is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music.

I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.

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

I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

...a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.

In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.

Games are nature's most beautiful creation

In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

Love is a fire/It burns everyone/It disfigures everyone/It is the world's excuse for being ugly.

You can say that I've grown bitter but of this you can be sure. The rich have get their channels in the bedrooms of the poor. And there's a mighty Judgement coming but I may be wrong.

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.

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