Leonard Cohen Quotes - Page 6

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.

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

No one's ever done one of my songs badly. People say to me, "God, so-and-so wrecked that song." Well, I'm unaware of it. Anybody doing one of my tunes has earned my gratitude, and I don't get that many covers where I have the luxury to choose.

Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.

Something I wrote quite a few years ago was, "The voices in my head, they don't care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through." It is a common mistake, to think you're going to go into some kind of spiritual practice and you're going to be relieved of the human burdens, from human crosses like thought, jealousy, despair - in fact, if anything, these feelings are amplified.

This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

Don't call yourself a secret unless you mean to keep it.

Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention.

Silence And a deeper silence When the crickets Hesitate

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.

Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win 'Vocalist of the Year'.

Someone gave me wishes and I wished for an embrace.

I'm never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.

There's no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he's probably the most sophisticated singer we've had in a generation. Nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan's a Picasso - that exuberance, range, and assimilation of the whole history of music.

No one masters the heart.

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five.

When you've fallen on the highway / and you're lying in the rain, / and they ask you how you're doing / of course you'll say you can't complain.

I have often prayed for you like this Let me have her

I don't have any spiritual strategy.

I turned my back on the devil, turned my back on the angel too.

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay, I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

And here you are hurried, And here you are gone; And here is the love, That it's all built upon.

You go your way I'll go your way too

ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars