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 ”

“Secret kabals of vegetarians habitually gather under the sign to exchange contraband from beyond the Vegetable Barrier. In their pinpoint eyes dances their old dream: the Total Fast. One of them reports a new atrocity published without compassionate comment by the editors of Scientific American: "It has been established that, when pulled from the ground, a radish produces an electronic scream." Not even the triple bill for 65˘ will comfort them tonight. With a mad laugh born of despair, one of them throws himself on a hot-dog stand, disintegrating on the first chew into pathetic withdrawal symptoms. The rest watch him mournfully and then separate into the Montreal entertainment section. The news is more serious than any of them thought. One is ravished by a steak house with sidewalk ventilation. In a restaurant, one argues with the waiter that he ordered "tomato" but then in a suicide of gallantry he agrees to accept the spaghetti, meat sauce mistake.”

“Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach. ”

“From bitter searching of the heart,quickened with passion and with painwe riseto play a greater part this is the faith from which we start.”

“Undertow""I set out one nightWhen the tide was lowThere were signs in the skyBut I did not knowI'd be caught in the gripOf the undertowDitched on a beachWhere the sea hates to goWith a child in my armsAnd a chill in my soulAnd my heart the shapeOf a begging bowl”

“You live your life as if it's real.......a thousand kisses deep”

“We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.”

“Now suzanne takes you handAnd she leads you to the riverShe is wearing rags and feathersFrom salvation army countersAnd the sun pours down like honeyOn our lady of the harbourAnd she shows you where to lookAmong the garbage and the flowersThere are heroes in the seaweedThere are children in the morningThey are leaning out for loveAnd they will lean that way foreverWhile suzanne holds the mirrorAnd you want to travel with herAnd you want to travel blindAnd you know that she will trust youFor shes touched your perfect body with her mind.”

“It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”

“F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?”

“In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!”

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

“I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.”

“I can't run no more with that lawless crowd while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud and they're going to hear from me. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.”

“In My Secret Life""I saw you this morning,you were moving so fast.Can't seem to loosen my gripOn the past.And I miss you so much,there's no one in sight.And we're still making loveIn my secret life.I smile when I am angry,I cheat and I lie,I do what I have to doto get by,In my secret life.”

“Love is the only engine of survival”

“Ah, grief makes us precise!”

“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.”

“Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.”

“Love is a fire/It burns everyone/It disfigures everyone/It is the world's excuse for being ugly.”

“My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character.”

“The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”

“SilenceAnd a deeper silenceWhen the cricketsHesitate”

“After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.”

“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 .”

“Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked By the winds of change and the weeds of sex looks like freedom but it feels like death it's something in between, I guess it's closing time.”

“He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair.”

“I must go now.""Stay up the night with me! We'll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We'll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, seashell. Or we'll go to the vegetable market. They've got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we'll go down to Forty-second Street and see the movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan --""I work tomorrow.""Which has nothing to do with it.""But I'd better go now.""I know this is unheard in America, but I'll walk you home.""I live on Twenty-third Street.""Exactly what I'd hoped. It's over a hundred blocks.”

“She was made of flesh and eyelashes.”

“You go your wayI'll go your way too”

“We are ugly but we have the music.”

“Except for a couple of hours in the morning which I passed in the company of a sage I stayed in bed without food only a few mouthfuls of water “you are a fine looking old man” I said to myself in the mirror “and what is more you have the correct attitude You don’t care if it ends or if it goes on And as for the women and the music there will be plenty of that in Paradise” Then I went to the Mosque of Memory to express my gratitude ”

“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.”

“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.”

“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”

“And I'll dance with you in Vienna,I'll be wearing a river's disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy 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.”

“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”

“... i didn't fall in love of courseit's never up to youbut she was walking back and forthand i was passing through”

“first of all nothing will happen and a little laternothing will happen again”

“what is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. if Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.”

“I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.”

“Dear Hitler Take away the torches I'm not guilty I had to have this”

“It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.”

“A heavy burden lifted from my soul,I heard that love was out of my control.”

“Like a bird on a wire,like a drunk in a midnight choir,I have tried in my way to be free!!”

“I am not the one who loved, it's love that chooses me.When hatred with it's package comes, you forbid delivery.”

“My friends are gone and my hair is grey.I ache in places I used to play.And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.”

“I have tried in my way to be free.”

“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.”

“How bitter werethe Prozac pillsof the lastfew hundred mornings”