Best 60 quotes of Gordon Lightfoot on MyQuotes

All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

A lot of people influenced me as I was learning but probably Bing Crosby was the most influential, because I would hear his Christmas albums, which my parents played a lot.

Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing She Loves You in August 1963.

Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

Don Quixote was a song for a 1969 Michael Douglas movie called Hail Hero! I wrote the title song for the film and they also used the Don Quixote one I had submitted.

Everything is trust, all the rest is dust.

Getting lost in her loving is your first mistake.

Give me a wave I can ride upon, come and show your strength to me.

I can remember sitting in a cabin outside of Denver writing that with a can of soup on the stove.

I can see her lying back in her faded dress in a room where do what you don't confess.

I don't know where we went wrong, but the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back.

If I could read your mind, what a tale your thoughts could tell. Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell.

'If You Could Read My Mind' was written during the collapse of my marriage. It's a great song. No one has any gripes about it. I wondered what my wife and daughter might think. My daughter is the one who got me to correct 'The feelings that you lacked' to 'The feelings that we lacked'.

If you plan to face tomorrow, do it soon.

I got to sing solo in the junior choir when I was 10 or 11 and won a competition, and my sister's piano playing improved to a certain level. One time my sister and I worked together. The first song we ever sang in High School was Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett.

I had lots of friends who were fighting in Vietnam and I am still friends with veterans of the war.

I liked the American folk style of Woody Guthrie.

I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

I'm a little nuts. I'm a lot nuts. All I know is that in the midst of the madness of this world it's my therapy. The music touches my heartstrings.

I'm not really a bird person or an Audubon guy who studies them, but as I was around them, they interested me.

I never really had stage nerves but I did have had trouble getting up to the right energy level. For a long time I drank. I drank up until 1982 and then I gave up alcohol.

I once performed The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald to about 15 sea captains. The song was about a ship that broke in half and sank.

I play piano, but not well enough to play professionally.

I remember when I first rocked in it was a great big dance hall and Tommy Young was blowing trombone and Louis [Armstrong] was singing a tune and it was just Satchmo and you could hear it resounding through the dance hall and people were dancing. It was a highlight.

I took the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face from a folk singer called Bonnie Dobson. I knew her and she had a record with that track on it.

I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation.

It seems so lucky to just to have the right of telling you with all my might, you're beautiful tonight.

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of".

I was a drummer in the bugle band in cadets. I marched. It's probably quite funny to look back on it.

I was happy to be in England, because my mother had always loved the royals, and so do I.

I was in Britain that year [1963] and some music publishing people in Denmark Street in London suggested me to the BBC. So I found myself in front of a British television show, which was a nice surprise.

I went on tours with [Bob] Dylan - the big one was in 1975 and called Roaring Thunder Review. I knew him well because I met him around the time he did his second album, in 1963. He recorded one of my songs called Shadows. In the 1970s, it was suggested that we do a duet, because we had the same manager, Albert Grossman, who also managed Odetta and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan and I respected what each other did, but I just decided not to do it.

I worked in a plant when I was 14 for two years. I always wanted to do the summer jobs. Honest to God, I always had to be doing something.

I would never have ever dreamed that I would get married again and then all of a sudden you meet somebody. That's the thing about life. It can be so unexpected.

Let our hearts touch far horizons. Let our love know no borders, Draw the Circles wide until, No one stands alone.

My daughter Meredith Moon from my second wife has a band that does Appalachian music, with five-strong banjo, clawhammer style. I may have to direct her somewhere. Meredith was my middle name. I would have to direct her because I am always directing something. She's in the musician's union and she is only 21. Your kids surprise you.

My first song was Hula Hoop Song, in 1955. It was a novelty song. I had to find someway to reach out and it was with a novelty song. Now, all of my recording obligations have been taken care of. I made 14 albums for Warner Brothers. Five for United Artist before that.

My parents got my sister and I to go to church and have piano lessons. We were keen and they could see that.

Of course I knew The Band's Canadian keyboard player, the late Richard Manuel, but I didn't play that night because I was there as a guest with my record executives. People ask, "why didn't you play?" If I had known I was going to be playing then I would have been prepared for it.

Rainy day people all know there's no sorrow they can't rise above.

See the judge upon the bench who tries the case as best he can, see the wise and wicked ones who feed upon life's sacred fire, see the soldier with his gun who must be dead to be admired.

She been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream.

Silent waters rocking on the morning of our birth, like an empty cradle waiting to be filled. And from the heart of God the Spirit moved upon the earth, like a mother breathing life into her child.

Sometimes a broken dream will make you sad or make you mean. Sometimes things ain't bad as they seem.

Sometimes I think it's a shame, when I get feeling better when I'm feeling no pain.

Some years later I met Queen Elizabeth II, in our capital Ottawa at a Canada Day celebration. David Foster and I were doing the show and we both met her afterwards. She told me how much she loved the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. She looked at me and said, "oh, that song", and then said again, "that song", and that was all she said.

SPEAK OF TROUBLE highlights the abilities of Lowell Sostomi as singer/songwriter and brings together a talented band of musicians with amazing dexterity, loads of energy, and very original arrangements. Im impressed.

The giant neon spinning discs are a reminder of the huge role that Sam Sniderman and his store played in the cultural life of Toronto and I believe they should be preserved and remounted in the interests of our city's heritage.

The house you live in will never fall down, if you pity the stranger who stands at your door.

There was a TV show called Thank Your Lucky Stars, with the catchphrase "I'll give it five!" The Beatles and Stones were so popular when they were on it. One week The Beatles were number one and then the Stones were right on their heels.