Leonard Cohen Quotes

The Dream" "O I had such a wonderful dream, she said. I dreamed you made love to me. At last, he said to himself, the spirit has taken up some of the heavy work.

Don't dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be.

Adam [Cohen] is a great singer-songwriter in his own right.

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

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.

I’ll be marching through the morning, Marching through the night, Moving 'cross the borders Of My Secret Life.

Sail on, sail on, o' might Ship of State. To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate. Sail on, sail on, sail on.

There are a few things that deal with passion. There's Prozac.

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.

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

Growing old becomes clear to you at a certain point. I think it's after the age of 70 you realize - you begin to actually be convinced - you're growing older.

To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.

The obstacles are great and the suffering is great and people have got to make a living.

So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed, It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed, It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star, I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

Other people singing my songs is something that I've never been casual about. I've always been very touched by it and I always go into immediate critical suspension.

In streams of light I clearly saw The dust you seldom see, Out of which the Nameless makes A Name for one like me... All busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance, And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance.

They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koue, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to piece the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion.

It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.

I'm planning a catastrophe.

English, I know you ... you are German with a license to kill.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

It's inappropriate for an elderly chap to register, you know, authentically, his feelings, you know, because they really can be interpreted. So you have to get quite covert as you get older. Or you have to find some avuncular way, you know, of responding.

To have [Adam's Cohen] microscopic attention to my work was really a great privilege.

We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.