Leonard Cohen

[1981slater]

Leonard Cohen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

quotes:

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

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.

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

I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.

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.

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

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

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.

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.

My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

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.