"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
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Quote collection
Leonard Cohen quotes (page 2 of 20)
399 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Fare thee well my nightingale, I lived but to be near you. Thow you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you."
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"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 ."
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"I'd written a lot of songs with hummingbirds in them. None of them ever came to anything, but I did write a few lines last month. It went like this: 'Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me'."
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"I’ve seen the nations rise and fall. I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, but love’s the only engine of survival."
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"I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree."
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"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul."
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"I always loved those little creatures [hummingbird], always feel blessed when they appear nearby. There's a magical quality to them. I finally put one in a song."
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"At the very center of our culture is a crucified man, a tortured man hanging on a cross of wood. You have an image of violence at the very center of our spiritual investigation."
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"And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moths."
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"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."
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"The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines."
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"I loved you for a long, long time I know this love is real It don't matter how it all went wrong That don't change the way I feel And I can't believe that time's Gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of There ain't no cure for love"
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"In the broken places, the light shines through."
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"I don't think there's any difference between a crush and profound love. I think the experience is that you dissolve your sentries and your battalions for a moment and you really do see that there is this unfixed free-flowing energy of emotion and thought between people, that it really is there."
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"The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show."
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"Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit."
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"I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse."
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"Follow me, the wise man said, but he walked behind."
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"Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act."
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