Leonard Cohen Quotes

Oh, but Masha, can’t you see? You are. An Ivan has come. That is like saying, Midnight has struck. It is time for bed, little one. You cannot have both. In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.

Do it. Before they send those mutts back or something. I don't want to die like Cato," he says. “Then you shoot me," I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. "You shoot me and go home and live with it!" And as I say it, I know death right here, right now would be the easier of the two.

Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?

All the tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away; they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to do - fight while they can.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent, then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see, there is simply no escape.

Never fight someone who is more willing to die than you are.

You must face the bloodbath and accept it.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

When you're at war you do what it takes to win.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

Please don't kill me!

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran.

Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence it is the getting out that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from the shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping to land away from where you are.

The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.

You kill -- You die." That was probably the most naive thing I've ever said. The fact is -- in most cases, NOW, the way things are -- you kill -- you LIVE.

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

In a war, you do whatever you have to do.