“There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen
“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
― Leonard Cohen
“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”
― Leonard Cohen
“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.”
― Leonard Cohen
“I don’t remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don’t remember
if I’m here alone
or waiting for someone.”
― Leonard Cohen
“I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”
― Leonard Cohen
“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Never make a decision when you need to pee.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you’re tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty .”
― Leonard Cohen
“You go your way
I’ll go your way too”
― Leonard Cohen
“Here’s to the few who forgive what you do, and the fewer who don’t even care”
― Leonard Cohen
“In My Secret Life”
“I saw you this morning,
you were moving so fast.
Can’t seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much,
there’s no one in sight.
And we’re still making love
In my secret life.
I smile when I am angry,
I cheat and I lie,
I do what I have to do
to get by,
In my secret life.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”
― Leonard Cohen
“I have tried in my way to be free.”
― Leonard Cohen
“… 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”
― Leonard Cohen
“first of all nothing will happen
and a little later
nothing will happen again”
― Leonard Cohen
“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 ”
― Leonard Cohen
“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Do not be a magician – be magic!”
― Leonard Cohen
“As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. ”
― Leonard Cohen
“The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”
― Leonard Cohen
“My reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.”
― Leonard Cohen
“It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender”
― Leonard Cohen
“We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Don’t call yourself a secret
unless you mean to keep it.”
― Leonard Cohen
“a kite is a victim you are sure of.
you love it because it pulls.”
― leonard cohen
“When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned. ”
― Leonard Cohen
“Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don’t know what to say.”
― Leonard Cohen
“She was made of flesh and eyelashes.”
― Leonard Cohen
“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.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Your body will never be familiar.”
― Leonard Cohen
“It’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
― Leonard Cohen
“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.”
― Leonard Cohen
“ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars”
― Leonard Cohen
“A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go.
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo.
I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.
They’re saving me a seat.”
― Leonard Cohen
“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed,
Everybody knows that the war is over,
Everybody knows the good guys lost.”
― Leonard Cohen
“You go to Heaven once you’ve been to Hell”
― Leonard Cohen
“The sweetest little song:
You go your way
I’ll go your way too!”
― Leonard Cohen
“Dream after dream we all lie in each other’s arms”
― Leonard Cohen
“When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you. ”
― Leonard Cohen
“If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.”
― Leonard Cohen
“And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.”
― Leonard Cohen
“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”
― Leonard Cohen
“I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.”
― Leonard Cohen
“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.”
― Leonard Cohen
“I’m not a very nostalgic person. I don’t really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.”
― Leonard Cohen