Leonard Cohen Quotes

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

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.

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

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.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

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.

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.

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

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.