Literary Birthday – 21 September – Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 and died on 7 November 2016.

Leonard Cohen Quotes

1. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
2. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
3. Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
4. The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
5. How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?
6. We are not mad. We are human. We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.
7. Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.
8. Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore.
9. I have tried in my way to be free.
10. [Cohen’s writing process was] like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.

This song, Traveling Light, was written by Cohen in 2016, the year he died.

Leonard Cohen was a Canadian poet, novelist, songwriter, musician, and painter. He began his literary career as a poet, publishing his first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956, shortly after graduating from McGill University. Cohen followed it with The Spice-Box of Earth in 1961, which established him as an important Canadian poet. He continued to write poetry and fiction throughout the 1960s, publishing the novel The Favourite Game in 1963. The autobiographical coming-of-age novel follows a young man who explores identity, relationships, and sexuality while discovering himself through writing. His poetry collection Flowers for Hitler was published in 1964. Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction while also developing his career as a singer and songwriter. His writing often explored love, desire, spirituality, loneliness, and the search for meaning. Cohen’s later literary works include Book of Mercy, a collection of poems and prayers, and Book of Longing, which combines poetry, prose, and drawings. His work was later collected in Poems And Songs. Cohen’s first novella and early short stories remained unpublished during his lifetime. They were collected in A Ballet of Lepers, published posthumously in 2022, offering further insight into his development as a fiction writer.

Image: Gorupdebesanez, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonard_Cohen,_1988_01.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar