“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. ”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Deprivation is the mother of poetry.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else."
Then let's be quiet together.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“She was made of flesh and eyelashes.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Your body will never be familiar.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“It doesn't matter how anything happens.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“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.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation. I'm no life-risk.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Dear Hitler
Take away the torches I'm not guilty I had to have this”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Coroner's inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn't been to the sea-shore in ten years.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios....”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of the page is no guarantee. Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation. He hated to argue about the techniques of verse. The poem is a dirty, bloody, burning thing that has to be grabbed first with bare hands. Once the fire celebrated Light, the dirt Humility, the blood Sacrifice. Now the poets are professional fire-eaters, freelancing at any carnival. The fire goes down easily and honours no one in particular.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau.
European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Sjeća se užasnih šutnji i plača koji nije mogao razumjeti. Ništa nije mogao učiniti, a najmanje od svega odjenuti se i otići. Mrzio je sebe zbog toga što joj nanosi bol, a ona je mrzila sebe što zato što ga guši. Onoga vedroga jutra nije trebao stati. Zbog nje se osjećao bespomoćnim. Oboje su se osjećali bspomoćnim zbog onoga drugoga.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“A rat is more alive than a turtle.
A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn’t count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“BREAVMAN KNOWS a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Ett ärr är vad som uppstår när ordet blir kött.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
Leonard Cohen
Born place: in Westmount, Québec, Canada
Born date September 21, 1934
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“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls
“People pay more attention when they think you’re up to something.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, quote from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”
― Isabel Allende, quote from The House of the Spirits
“It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding”
― Stieg Larsson, quote from The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
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HauntedBookQuoters 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.
