Quote

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

Leonard Cohen

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Leonard Cohen
Age: 82 †
Born: 1934
Born: September 21
Died: 2016
Died: November 7
Film Actor
Lyricist
Musician
Novelist
Pianist
Poet
Record Producer
Screenwriter
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Street Artist
Writer
Leonard Norman Cohen
Jikan
Life
Entire
Strategies
Goes
Anguish
Pleasure
Collapse
Speak
Background
Sense
Backgrounds
Wells
Depression
Well
Strategy
Unavailable
Nothing
Anxiety
Clinical

More quotes by Leonard Cohen

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At the very center of our culture is a crucified man, a tortured man hanging on a cross of wood. You have an image of violence at the very center of our spiritual investigation.
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Most of our distractions are designed to invite us away from this recognition, which is a good idea.
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I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.
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To the men and women who own men and women those of us meant to be lovers we will not pardon you for wasting our bodies and time
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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.
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I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
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How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?
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It's you my love, you who are the stranger.
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My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room. This system has just worked for me, even though I've had to sweat over every word. It's just my style.
Leonard Cohen
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I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.
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A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.
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I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.
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I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
Leonard Cohen
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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
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Even without the mushroom cloud still I would have hated Listen I would have done the same things even if there were no death I will not be held like a drunkard under the cold tap of facts I refuse the universal alibi
Leonard Cohen
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The psychologists are valiantly trying to provide us with answers, the religious people are trying to provide us with answers. I think it properly falls on the cultural workers to investigate this predicament with a little less concern for the marketplace and a little more concern for their higher calling.
Leonard Cohen
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You should go from place to place recovering the poems that have been written for you to which you can affix your signature. Don't discuss these matters with anyone. Retrieve. Retrieve. When the basket is full someone will appear to whom you can present it.
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Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
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My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.
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If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask me to. And if you want another kind of love I'll wear a mask for you.
Leonard Cohen