I'm Your Man Quotes

“I had wonderful love but I did not give back wonderful love, I was unable to reply to their love. Because I was obsessed with some fictional sense of separation, I couldn't touch the thing that was offered to me,and it was offered to me everywhere.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“What I mean by depression isn't just the blues, it's not just like a hangover from the weekend,or the girl didn't show up or something like that" said Leonard describing the paralyzing darkness and anxiety he experienced. "It's kind of a mental violence that stops you functioning from one moment from the next" Leonard took the spending "a lot of time alone. Dying." He said "letting myself slowly die”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“He wrote how he "needed to be by himself, so he could miss her, to get some perspective”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“She also asked him his views on marrige and monogamy given the imminent arrival of his second child with Suzanne. "I think marrying is for very very high minded people" he said. "It is a discipline of extreme severity. To really turn your back on all the other possibilities and all the other experiences of love,of passion,of ecstasy,and to determine to find it within one embrace is a high and righteous notion. Marriage today is the monastery,the monastery today is freedom. " he told Marion he had arrived "at a more realistic vision" of himself. There was no "high purpose" in his activities. "I'm just going" he said "so I don't have to stay still”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“It was so much more exquisite to long for somebody than to have her there beside him.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“When something was said in a certain kind of way, it seemed to embrace the cosmos. It’s not just my heart, but every heart was involved, and the loneliness was dissolved, and you felt that you were this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“In his view, the ancient Japanese way, where men would meet and “bow to each other for as much as half an hour speaking words of greeting, gradually moving closer together, understanding the necessity of entering another’s consciousness carefully,”1 was a good one.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“I don’t know which side everybody’s on any more, and I don’t really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we’re on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order. It doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you courage in your struggle. There are on both sides of this struggle men of goodwill. That is important to remember, some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“You finish listening to a song of Leonard's and you know he's said everything he had to say, he didn't let the song go till he was done with it.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“Dearest Shell, if you let me I’d always keep you 400 miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. . . . I’m afraid to live any place but in expectation.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“There would be a book tour too, he said, and he wanted Marianne to come with him. "Mahalia Jackson is on the record player, I'm right there with her, flying with you in that glory, pulling away the shrouds from the sun, making music out of everything." Man he wrote a mean letter. The telegram he sent was shorter but equally effective: "Have a flat. All I need is my woman and her child." Marianne packed two suitcases and flew with Axel to Montreal.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“Let me never speak casually.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“Genius, Layton said, is “the ability—a very rare ability—to see things as they actually are. You are not fooled.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“If I’m not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when? But if I’m only for myself, who am I?”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“Live Songs, he said, represented “a very confused and”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“It’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed dancing. I sometimes even forget I belong to an inferior race. The Twist is the greatest ritual since circumcision—and there you can choose between the genius of two cultures. Myself I prefer the Twist.”1”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“Jedes Gedicht, das dich berührt, ist wie ein Ruf, der eine Reaktion erfordert, und man möchte mit seiner eigenen Geschichte antworten.”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“Thirty-nine years later the spellbinding performance was released, along with Lerner’s footage, on the CD/DVD Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. A”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

“They were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. . . . Back in the city their families were growing like vines. . . . They were flying from the majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine,” Leonard wrote, re-creating these night rides with Mort in fiction. “The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever.”20”
― Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen