“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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“Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from Collected Fictions
“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome
“People who go around advertising their birthdays are douchebags. It's a fact. You can look it up on Wikipedia.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility
“You risked much, to give your love to such a one.
I stared at him. Love?
Did you not know, until now, when you must say goodbye?”
― Juliet Marillier, quote from Daughter of the Forest
“She had challenged him on this point one night at Anne and George's, inhibitions weakened by Ronrico: "Explain this Mass to me!"
There was a silence as he sat still, apparently looking at the dinner plates and chicken bones. "Consider the Star of David," he said quietly. "Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image—the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space." His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. "I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts—like eating bread and drinking wine—can be transformed and made sacred.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from The Sparrow
Cuts Like An Angel
The Leopard
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Leonardo's Notebooks
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.
