Category Archives: Leonard Cohen

As the world becomes more and more baffling and bewildering, one is thrown back on one’s own shabby little story. [The Book of Longing] is just my little story.

— Leonard Cohen

It’s going to happen very soon. The great event which will end the horror. Which will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will reverse the effects of the world’s mad plunge into suffering for the last 200 million years. What a lovely night that will be. What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again, and the retired nightingales pick up their dusty tails and assert the majesty of creation.

— Leonard Cohen, ‘The Great Event’

I’m forty-one, the moon is full,
you make love very well.
You touch me like I touch myself,
I like you, Mademoiselle.
You’re so fresh and you’re so new,
I do enjoy you, Miss.
There’s nothing I would rather do
than move around just like this.

— Leonard Cohen, ‘Do I Have To Dance All Night?’

Here comes your bride with her veil on
Approach her, you wretch, if you dare
Approach her, you ape with your tail on

— Leonard Cohen, from ‘Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On’

Now I know you’re sitting there, deep in your velvet seats, and you’re thinking, ‘He’s up there saying something that he thinks about, but I’ll never have to sing that song’. But I promise you friends, you’re going to be singing this song. It may not be tonight, it may not be tomorrow, but one day you’ll be on your knees and I want you to know the words when the time comes. Because you’re going to have to sing it to yourself, or to another, or to your brother. You’re going to have to learn to sing this song.

— Leonard Cohen, ‘Please Don’t Pass Me By’

I stopped to listen, but he did not come. I began again with a sense of loss. As this sense deepened I heard him again. I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance. This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all. Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode. I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love. I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields. Haltingly he moves toward his throne. Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing. In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked, the court is established on beams on golden symmetry, and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

– Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

Whenever I happen to see you
I forget for a while
That I am ugly in my own eyes
For not winning you

I wanted you to choose me
Over all the men you know
Because I am destroyed
In their company

I have often prayed for you
Like this
Let me have her

— Leonard Cohen, The Energy of Slaves

Q: That holiness you speak of, we seem bereft of it. It’s not in vogue to have that sense of spirituality anymore. Do you still cultivate it for yourself?

LC: I’m aware that I’m embraced by the absolute, as we are all embraced by the absolute. I feel that the technology for experiencing the absolute has been lost. But all the great religions have this experience, this information, this data, this technology which can [give you] this experience. I’ve always wondered why religions emphasise this idea of ‘belief’. Why should you believe in these matters? But experiencing these matters is available to all of us, experiencing the absolute is available. To be tyrannical or to be in some way oppressive about belief… I think it’s not fair to ask people to believe [when] they don’t experience. But we have the technology to experience the absolute, and I would just invite everybody to investigate their own religions. It’s not necessary to find a new one.

— Leonard Cohen

When you consider the fact of our little journey on the crust of this star, and the number of bridges, barriers, differentiations, diversions that we manage to construct for ourselves, to have an opportunity to dissolve them is really… a great opportunity. Because that moment is precisely there to dissolve those distinctions. If you don’t have moments when the distinctions are dissolved, then you become a very narrow, bitter, prejudiced, dogmatic kind of individual. Like I am most of the time. But from time to time I am permitted to dissolve these things.

— Leonard Cohen