Bruce Cockburn Quotes

The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.

In between effect and cause and just beyond the range of normal sight, this glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws.

Little round planet in a big universe, sometimes it looks blessed, sometimes it looks cursed. Depends what you look at obviously, but even more it depends on the way that you see.

Though chains be of gold, they are chains all the same.

I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song is, 'My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.'

It's a phobia I have. I never assume I'm going to be able to write another album after I finish one.

Above the dark town
After the sun's gone down
Two vapour trails cross the sky
Catching the day's last slow goodbye
Black skyline looks rich as velvet
Something is shining
Like gold but better
Rumours of glory...

All these years of thinking, ending up like this: In front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.

I like to think that if it hadn't gone as well as it has, if I wasn't able to make a living off of playing music, I would still be playing the music. But, of course, I wouldn't likely have had the opportunity to travel, and a lot of the places have inspired songs.

But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.

I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love moving like stray dogs to the anthem of night long conversations of pulsing rhythms and random voltage voices in spite of themselves graceful as these raindrops creeping spermlike across the car window.

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.

If you don't keep learning and growing, you're going to stagnate.

If I try to understand what it means to be a Christian, I look at the two instructions that were given in the Bible that are paramount, and those are to love God with all your heart and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's it.

I remember when the idea of living to be 40 seemed absurd.

Some people never see the light Till it shines thru bullet holes.

Got to kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds daylight

I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.

'Gifts' was just a short little one-verse song that I used to close shows in the '60s.

I've been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I've formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door
Isn't that what friends are for?

Lord, spit on our eyes that we may see, how to wake up from this tragedy.

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

There was a lot more music than the size of the place would indicate.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

And I'm wondering where the lions are.

Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.

We're confronted with great darkness as a species right now as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don't think it's hopeless, and I don't want 'You've Never Seen Everything' to make people feel hopeless. But I think we've got to call a spade a spade.

'Each One Lost' I wrote the day after I got home. My week in Afghanistan was a very short trip, but it was a powerful experience.

One day you're waiting for the sky to fall, The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all.

Male female slave or free; peaceful or disorderly; maybe you and he will not agree; but you need him to show you new ways to see.

I wear my shadows where they're harder to see, but they follow me everywhere. I guess that should tell me I'm travelling toward light.

There are some decision-makers in the world whose version of sanity is a little different from what I consider the right one.