Leonard Cohen
Canadian poet, songwriter, singer, and novelist.
I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove she was moving too,
And every single breath that we drew was
Hallelujah.
We're drinking and we're dancing
but there's nothing really happening.
The place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night.
And here you are hurried,
And here you are gone;
And here is the love,
That it's all built upon.
The captain called me to his bed and fumbled for my hand
"Take these silver bars," he said, "I'm giving you command."
Command of what? There's no on here. There's only you and me.
The rest are dead or in retreat or with the enemy.
"Complain, complain, that's all you've done ever since we lost,
If it's not the crucifixion then it's the holocaust."
When it all comes down to dust I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.
You can say that I've grown bitter but of this you can be sure.
The rich have get their channels in the bedrooms of the poor.
And there's a mighty Judgement coming
but I may be wrong
Please understand, I never had a secret chart
to get me to the heart of this
or any other matter.
When he talks like this
you don't know what he's after.
I know there is an eye that watches all of us. There is a judgment that weighs everything we do. And before this great force, which is greater than any government I stand in awe and I kneel in respect and it is to this great judgment that I dedicate this next song, "Hallelujah".
Although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warmed. That's the great Generosity of women and the great generosity of of the Creator who worked it out is that there are no unilateral agreements on sexuality.
You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he'll never need to deal another.
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
This is the very contrary of dropping out. Most people can't wait to get home to their house or apartment and shut that door and turn on the TV. To me, that's dropping out.
You whisper, "You have loved enough,
Now let me be the Lover."
No one says naked like Leonard Cohen.
No one ever listens to me. I might as well be a Leonard Cohen record.
May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And my love, Goodbye.
All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.
I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work — just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.
I smile when I'm angry, I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do to get by.
But I know what is wrong and I know what is right,
and I'd die for the truth in my secret life.