Quotes by John Burnside

“My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something terrible. [Burnside,...”

“As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasnt here. Before that, my parents werent here. And before that”

“It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, ...”

“The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.”

“If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big house, or the fancy car, assuming you had such things. It wouldn't be your impeccable reputation...”

“All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born”

“If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language were words and grammar.”

“There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger...”

“Everything stayed hidden [] it was all secret known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priests feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured o...”

“When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gratefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all:...”

“When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all:...”

“What the flamingo teaches a child, at that subliminal level where animal encounters work, is that gravity is not just a limitation, but also a possible partner in an intriguing, potentially joyful ...”

“This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands...”

“It is common knowledge now that we depend on insects for our continued existence; that, without key pollinators, the human population would collapse in less than a decade.”

“The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating. If you entered that wild place on its own terms, you might be accorded wisdom.”

“Poetry stands or falls by its music.”

“My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.”

“With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.”

“I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.”

“The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.”