We do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity.
Interpretation
Lovers possess the unique ability to transform essential needs into meaningful gifts for each other.
In this quote, Leonard Cohen highlights the profound way in which love can elevate even the most basic necessities into acts of generosity and significance. It suggests that true love involves a deep mutual understanding and the capacity to create beauty and value from the ordinary, enriching the relationship by turning necessity into a selfless gift.
In practice
In a speech at a wedding, one might say, 'As Leonard Cohen reminds us, we do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity.'
What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.
I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.
I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.
Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.
She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
Romances I ne'er read like those I have seen.
In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
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