Jorunn > Jorunn's Quotes

“We are ugly but we have the music.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me...
All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.”
― Leonard Cohen

“We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.”
― Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs

“There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.”
― Leonard Cohen

“A Kite is a Victim

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you've written
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so you make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric and pure.


Gift

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me


There are some men

There are some men
who should have mountains
to bear their names through time
Grave markers are not high enough
or green
and sons go far away to lose the fist
their father’s hand will always seem

I had a friend he lived and died
in mighty silence and with dignity
left no book son or lover to mourn.
Nor is this a mourning song
but only a naming of this mountain
on which I walk
fragrant, dark and softly white
under the pale of mist
I name this mountain after him.


-Believe nothing of me
Except that I felt your beauty
more closely than my own.
I did not see any cities burn,
I heard no promises of endless night,
I felt your beauty
more closely than my own.
Promise me that I will return.-


-When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.-


Song

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I'd
never been your lover

-Reach into the vineyard of arteries for my heart.
Eat the fruit of ignorance and share with me the mist and
fragrance of dying.-”
― Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth

“Silence

And a deeper silence

When the crickets

Hesitate”
― Leonard Cohen

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

“I dreamed about you baby.
It was just the other night.
Most of you was naked
Ah, but some of you was light.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Ah, grief makes us precise!”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

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

“I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.”
― Leonard Cohen

“If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.”
― Leonard Cohen

“My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.”
― Leonard Cohen

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

“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.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Leonard Cohen Collection

“Undertow"

"I set out one night
When the tide was low
There were signs in the sky
But I did not know
I'd be caught in the grip
Of the undertow
Ditched on a beach
Where the sea hates to go
With a child in my arms
And a chill in my soul
And my heart the shape
Of a begging bowl”
― Leonard Cohen

“Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear”
― Leonard Cohen

“Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Love is the only engine of survival”
― Leonard Cohen

“It’s a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you. ”
― Leonard Cohen

“Maybe there's a God above,
As for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight,
It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.”
― Leonard Cohen

“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.”
― Leonard Cohen

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

“Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

“It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.”
― Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

“As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you and never will”
― Leonard Cohen