Quotes from Beautiful Losers

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Never make a decision when you need to pee.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Do not be a magician - be magic!”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“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, quote from Beautiful Losers

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

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

“..you wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

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

“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, quote from Beautiful Losers

“My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a
real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but
one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and
changed into itself over and over.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“I don't want to be a star, merely dying.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“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?”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Games are nature's most beautiful creation”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koue, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to piece the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine. But some do not hear it this way, some flying successful moon-shot eyes do not see it this way. They do not hear the individual noises shhh,hiss, they hear the sound of the sounds together, they behold the interstices flashing up and down the cone of the flowering whirlwind.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“We've got to learn to love appearances.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“...a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Yo no sé nada de amor, pero algo como el amor arrancó de mi garganta, con mil anzuelos, las siguientes palabras:

-PORQUE TE NECESITO, F.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“To kiss her there was to intrude into something private and skeletal, like a turtle’s shoulder.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colours that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Kärlek kan man inte samla i lador. Finns det en del av Jesus i vartenda massfabricerat krucifix?

Alla offer som vi inte själva mördar eller spärrar in är inbillade offer.

Och F. sa: Jag bär mitt hjärta som en krona. Så försvann de, de spetälskevita metoperna och trygliferna och alla de andra snirkliga namnen som står för renhet; bleka tempel och förfallna altaren försvann under den scharlakansröda glasyren.

Det ursprungligaste i en människas natur är ofta det som är det mest desperata. Således påtvingas världen nya system av människor som helt enkelt inte står ut med att leva med det som är. Det enda som betyder något för en skapare är att hans system är unikt.

Mitt hat till smärtan är nåt så extra kolossalt fantastisk, mycket viktigare än ditt hat till smärtan, men min kropp är så mycket mera central, jag är smärtans Moskva, du är bara en väderstation på landet.

Var med mig, religiösa amuletter av alla slag, ni smo hänger i silverkedjor, ni som sitter fastmålade på underkläder med en säkerhetsnål, ni som gömmer er i svart brösthår, ni som löper som spårvagnshjul i springan mellan gamla lyckliga kvinnors bröst, ni som av misstag pressas in i skinnet när någon älskar, ni som fingras som mynt och på vilka man letar efter silverstäplar, ni som har kommit bort bland kläderna för kelande femtonåringar, ni som stoppas i mun medan man tänker, ni mycket dyrbara som bara spinkiga små flickebarn för lov att bära, ni som hänger i skärpkammare tillsammans med uppknutna slipsar, ni som blir kyssta för att bringa tur, ni som rycks från halsen i vredesmod, ni som är pressade, ni som är graverade, ni som blir lagda på spårvägsspår för att få en ny och lustig form, ni som sitter fast i innerklädseln i taxitak...

Vi ljuger alla dröm efter dröm i varandras armar. Morgon efter morgon finner vintern mig ensam bland slitna löv med fruset snor och frusna tårar i ögonbrynnen.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“No sospeché la insignificancia de mi sueño. Creí haber concebido el sueño más vasto de mi generación: quse ser mago. Ésa era mi idea de la gloria. He aquí una súplica basada en toda mi experiencia: no seas mago, sé mágico.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way?”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

“Todas las disparidades del mundo, las diversas alas de la paradoja, las dos caras del problema, las preguntas de deshojar la margarita, la concienca con forma de tijera, todas las polaridades, las cosas y sus imágenes y las cosas que no proyectan sombras y, sencillamente, las explosiones cotidianas de una calle, esta cara y aquélla, una casa y un dolor de muelas, explosiones que sólo tienen, en su nombre, letras diferentes, mi aguja todo lo atraviesa, y yo mismo, mis ávidas fantasías, todo lo que ha existido y hoy existe, somos parte de un collar de imcomprensible belleza y falta de sentido.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from Beautiful Losers

About the author

Popular quotes

“I will find you," Ragnor told him. "I will find whatever chest of absurd clothes you have. And I will bring a llama into the place where you sleep and make sure that it urinates on everything you possess.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from What Really Happened in Peru

“No man lives, can live, without having some object in view, and making efforts to attain that object. But when object there is none, and hope is entirely fled, anguish often turns a man into a monster.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The House of the Dead

“Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Just as negative self-paradigms can put limitations on us, positive self-paradigms can bring out the best in us, as the following story about the son of King Louis XVI of France illustrates: King Louis had been taken from his throne and imprisoned. His young son, the prince, was taken by those who dethroned the king. They thought that inasmuch as the king’s son was heir to the throne, if they could destroy him morally, he would never realize the great and grand destiny that life had bestowed upon him. They took him to a community far away, and there they exposed the lad to every filthy and vile thing that life could offer. They exposed him to foods the richness of which would quickly make him a slave to appetite. They used vile language around him constantly. They exposed him to lewd and lusting women. They exposed him to dishonor and distrust. He was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by everything that could drag the soul of a man as low as one could slip. For over six months he had this treatment—but not once did the young lad buckle under pressure. Finally, after intensive temptation, they questioned him. Why had he not submitted himself to these things— why had he not partaken? These things would provide pleasure, satisfy his lusts, and were desirable; they were all his. The boy said, “I cannot do what you ask for I was born to be a king.”
― Sean Covey, quote from The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens

“I pushed away my dessert, suddenly no longer hungry. Resentment had a way of filling up your stomach.”
― Marlene Perez, quote from Dead Is the New Black

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.