Leonard Cohen Quotes

Alcoholics don’t have relationships-they take hostages.

Rescue someone unwilling to look after himself, and he will cling to you like a dangerous illness.

There have been a couple specific instances where I've felt like I couldn't survive without interacting with a certain person. I've been involved with some pretty manipulative people who have told me the same thought: that I can't live without them.

Being codependent means that when you die, someone else's life passes before your eyes.

Women have a natural tendency to want to nurture and take care of men. You always think that the guy is going to end up coming around and that you’re going to be the one that saves him - like the Oasis song.

Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors.

You can't take responsibility for everything. You can't have that kind of control. At some point, it's all out of our hands.

...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.' That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.

There's lots of ways people can be dependent, on another person, or drugs.

I nursed a worthless, pint drinker for twelve years and when my lazy, life-sucking, daddy finally died, I swore to God with tears in my eyes I'd never marry one. And then I did.

My son will forever travel through a moonless night with only the roar of wind for company.... A drowning man is not separated from the lust for air by a bridge of thought—he is one with it—and my son, conceived and grown in an ethanol bath, lives each day in the act of drowning. For him there is no shore.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can't control it. Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.

When you're addicted to heroin, there is only one thing you can do - go off heroin. But we're not going to throw away these phones, we're not going to throw away our technology.

Tell me what you want, and then I'll put in what I want... after I'm done with my codependent providing for you, I'll get a little for me too.

It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender

What good are you? What can you do? It has cost me a thousands of dollars to raise you, feed you, clothe you! Suppose I left you here on the street? Then what would you do?" "Catch butterflies

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.

If you get deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.

Never say of anything I have lost it, only say that I have given it back.

You know when grandparents get older and they can't do things for themselves anymore? I'm gonna struggle with that. Because I hate depending on people to do anything for me.

I have to. I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.

How I feel is cheap and used, dirty and humiliated. Dirty and tricked and thrown away.

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.

He's like a drug for you, Bella. I see that you can't live without him now. It's too late. But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun.

My view of addiction, whether it's drugs, food, alcohol or any list of other things, is the same reason I asked my mother why I wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic, which is because when you're not loved, often people become an addict and self destructive. Now the opposite of love is indifference and even worse is rejection and abuse, and I meet those people.