Leonard Cohen Quotes

i would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former ss monsters
However since it is
new year's eve
and i have lip cancer
i will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance

It's the notion that there is no perfection - that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.

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

We're drinking and we're dancing
but there's nothing really happening.
The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night.

I don't know which side is anybody on any more. I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order. That doesn't mean that I don't wish you courage in your struggle. There is on both sides of the struggle men of good will. That is important to remember. On both sides of the struggle, some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety and solemn testimony of that unbroken faith which binds generations one to another I sing this song, "If It Be Your Will"

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.

I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad you stood in my way.

Then I start to struggle
With a feeble song
Which will overcome me
Many miles from home

I'm old and the mirrors don't lie.

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio
very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters.
Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the
present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a
dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your
memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory
on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this?
Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how,
find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar,
dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on
for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but
who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your
life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy
robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch
around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again
and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second,
my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in
crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

a kite is a victim you are sure of.
you love it because it pulls.

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

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love

O God, make me poor enough
to love yurd diamond in the rough,
or in my failure let me see,
my greed raised to mistery.

Do you hate the one who must
turn your world all to dust?
Do you hate the ones who ask
if Creation wears a mask

God beyond the God I name,
if mask and fire are the same,
repair the seam my love leaps through ,
uncreated fire to pursue.

Network of cretated fire,
maim my love and my desire.
Make me poor so I may be,
servant in the world I see