Bruce Cockburn > Quotes

“One day you're waiting for the sky to fall
The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all”
― Bruce Cockburn

“Got to kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds daylight”
― Bruce Cockburn

“Everybody wants to see justice done, to somebody else.”
― Bruce Cockburn

“All these years of thinking, ending up like this: In front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.”
― Bruce Cockburn

“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?”
― Bruce Cockburn

“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...”
― Bruce Cockburn

“I have tried to keep Jesus the compassionate activist close to my heart, along with Jesus as portal to the cosmos, but I have long been leery of the dogma and doctrine that so many have attached to Christianity as well as to most other religions.”
― Bruce Cockburn, Rumours of Glory: A Memoir

“Sometimes you find yourself...pacing the cage”
― Bruce Cockburn

“We are on a great journey, through darkness and dawn, across time, though sometimes I fear that our journey is about to end. We must not succumb to fear or avarice; we must continue to embrace life, seek light, and gather in the charity of night. This is what God wants from us and for us. Mirrors of the past shine with the hue of unborn days, just as stars glitter in the dark night to light our way.”
― Bruce Cockburn, Rumours of Glory: A Memoir

“We loved the wide-open west. Our explorations of the numinous Canadian landscape fed the songs, and our souls. We caught the west in the last of its wild state. Many of the songs I wrote in the seventies reflect our travels through the great expanse of the Canadian prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, to the moisture-rich West Coast. Space was everywhere, and there is space in the songs. Everything wasn’t a tourist trap yet, clear-cutting was not so evident, and agribusiness hadn’t completely killed off the family farm. In the first couple of years that Kitty, Aroo, and I travelled westward from Ontario, we were practically the only road campers out there. Seldom did we run across anyone else travelling the way we were. The prairies were full of abandoned old farmhouses—no families to be seen—harbingers of the reversion to feudal agricultural economics. All around the land still looked wild. Our journeys offered at least the illusion of freedom, as well as a deep sense of the land as Divine creation. Soon, though, we were seeing the spaces fill up with scabrous industrial sites, hotels, housing developments, shopping opportunities. We’d watch like gawkers at a train wreck as the land was eaten up before our eyes by inevitable human expansion and greed. There were ever more rules about where you could park your camper. It was the tail end of an epoch when the land was open and it, and we, could breathe freely. That will never come again.”
― Bruce Cockburn, Rumours of Glory: A Memoir

“In the absence of vision, there are nightmares.”
― Bruce Cockburn