“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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“the boys wanted someone they could have a laugh with, someone who shared their irreverent sense of humour.”
― Cynthia Lennon, quote from John
“Women are riddles—I only argued upon the common sense of the thing.”
― Frederick Marryat, quote from The Children of the New Forest
“Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by dying of their own family gout. It has come down through the illustrious line like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, “My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from The Complete Works of Charles Dickens
“It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself.”
― John Piper, quote from Don't Waste Your Life
“I don't know whether the spider perhaps does not hate the fly he has marked and is snaring. Dear little fly! It seems to me that the victim is loved, or at least may be loved. Here I love my enemy. I am delighted, for instance, that she is so beautiful. I am delighted, madam, that you are so haughty and majestic. If you were meeker it would not be so delightful. You have spat on me -- and I am triumphant. If you were literally to spit in my face I should really not be angry because you -- are my victim; mine and not his. How fascinating was that idea! Yes, the secret consciousness of power is more insupportably delightful than open domination. If I were a millionaire I believe I should take pleasure in going about in the oldest clothes and being taken for a destitute man, almost a beggar, being jostled and despised. The consciousness of the truth would be enough for me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Adolescent
The Green Mile
White Oleander
Catching Fire
Beautiful Disaster
Othello
The Vampire LestatBookQuoters 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.
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