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
Well
Strategy
Unavailable
Nothing
Anxiety
Clinical
Life
Entire
Strategies
Goes
Anguish
Pleasure
Collapse
Speak
Background
Sense
Backgrounds
Wells
Depression

More quotes by Leonard Cohen

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After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.
Leonard Cohen
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Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen
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I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.
Leonard Cohen
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Love is a fire/It burns everyone/It disfigures everyone/It is the world's excuse for being ugly.
Leonard Cohen
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Sail on, sail on, o' might Ship of State. To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate. Sail on, sail on, sail on.
Leonard Cohen
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It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.
Leonard Cohen
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I guess you go for nothing, if you really want to go that far.
Leonard Cohen
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No one's ever done one of my songs badly. People say to me, God, so-and-so wrecked that song. Well, I'm unaware of it. Anybody doing one of my tunes has earned my gratitude, and I don't get that many covers where I have the luxury to choose.
Leonard Cohen
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All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.
Leonard Cohen
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Music is the emotional life of the most people.
Leonard Cohen
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I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others it's for others to use.
Leonard Cohen
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The dreamers ride against the men of action. Oh see the men of action falling back.
Leonard Cohen
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In streams of light I clearly saw The dust you seldom see, Out of which the Nameless makes A Name for one like me... All busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance, And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance.
Leonard Cohen
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Maybe there's a god above but the only thing I learned from love was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.
Leonard Cohen
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You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes one kind.
Leonard Cohen
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Well I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.
Leonard Cohen
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How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?
Leonard Cohen
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But remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen
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We actually lead very violent, passionate lives and I think that we're hungry for insights into this condition. That's why we get all that stuff on television. It's really where we are, really what we are.
Leonard Cohen
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And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.
Leonard Cohen