John Burnside Quotes & Sayings

The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper. — John Burnside

The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes. — John Burnside

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. — John Burnside

With each passing decade, history becomes less real for us, less immediate and essential to our way of life, and so, like 'green' nature, more of a commodity or an advertising gimmick. — John Burnside

If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how. — John Burnside

I want to venture a hypothesis that, roughly expressed, goes like this: you cannot learn to love yourself until you find something in the world to love; no matter what it is. A dog, a garden, a tree,a flight of birds, a friend ... Because what we love in ourselves is ourselves loving. — John Burnside

I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime. — John Burnside

If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it. — John Burnside

A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit. — John Burnside

Andoya is in a different world, set at the northern edge of Europe in what seems to be a time and weather of its own. — John Burnside

The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house. — John Burnside

One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.' — 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, p. 27] — John Burnside

I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen from south of the border acquired great tracts of this vast wetland in the far north in order to plant non-native conifer plantations that attract hefty tax breaks. — John Burnside

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice. — John Burnside

I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.' — John Burnside

Poetry stands or falls by its music. — John Burnside

And because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day's
pale knowledge,
you'll come to yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,
and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire. — John Burnside

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks. — John Burnside

Sometimes, coming home in the early morning like this, I'd imagine things had altered while I was absent: a knife on the bread board that I didn't remember leaving out, a book face down on the table, a cup brimming with tea and dishwater in the sink. The evidence I wanted didn't need to be too elaborate or detailed. I could have constructed an entire afterlife from a half-moon of lemon rind or a small blister of jam on the tablecloth. — John Burnside

As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures. — John Burnside

My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them. — John Burnside

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise. — John Burnside

Every time I write a book, I think how I could be doing it better to please people - a nicer book with nicer characters - but I just can't. — John Burnside

He was someone who had to live alone, someone who found it difficult to be with others for any length of time, because he only had one mode - that discreet art of withdrawal which had, no doubt, taken him years to perfect. He had no other strategies for getting along with people and, though his colleagues probably saw this as the mark of a gentle, erudite, considerate soul, I was suddenly able to see right through it. Not because I was so very perceptive, but because I was so like him. He had been living in that one mode for so long, he had almost forgotten about it, but I was a near-beginner, and for me it was painfully obvious. — John Burnside

Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall. — John Burnside

A mad person isn't someone who sees what isn't there; he's someone who sees what is there but that others can't see. I really believe that. — John Burnside

A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. — John Burnside

Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi. — John Burnside

The definition of a page-turner really aught to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one. — John Burnside

I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment. — John Burnside

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise. — John Burnside

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. — John Burnside

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives. — John Burnside

He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [ ... ] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22] — John Burnside

My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was. — John Burnside

High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world. — John Burnside

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, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures. — John Burnside

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world. — John Burnside

Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery. — John Burnside

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings. — John Burnside

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. — John Burnside

More often than not, the demons of our nature love a recluse; nobody is more vulnerable to himself than the solitary. To imagine that one can simply withdraw, and somehow achieve peace, or wisdom, or detachment, is a mistake. It is also, in most cases, inappropriate, selfish, and even cowardly. — John Burnside

Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's something wrong and throw it away. — John Burnside

As a lifetime proposition, happiness is a discipline, no doubt; but for moments at a time, it's a piece of luck. A piece of luck and a clue: a hint, not just of what might be, but of what already exists, in the heart of a man's heart ... — John Burnside

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means. — John Burnside

All my life, I have been a celebrant of Halloween. For me, it is the most important day of the year, the turning point in the old pagan calendar. — John Burnside

It's the journeys we make you said not our sins that we have to account for: places we passed on a road and failed to recognise: the light in a gap between trees that we barely noticed storms above a hayfield like the black in monochrome the neither here nor there of detours or oncoming traffic. It's the lives we failed to lead lost in a stalled conversation or glancing away to cottonwoods and miles of blue-stemmed grass and everything we miss each least detail patterns and lines in the packed silt around a mooring windows flecked with light and water shades of grey in this or any other afternoon. — John Burnside

A forest - the word dates back to the Norman occupancy, when it meant an area set aside for England's violent new masters to hunt boar and deer - is necessarily larger than a wood. It belonged to the king and was a fit place for his recreation. — John Burnside

Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative. — John Burnside

For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place. — John Burnside

I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I'd been walking with some older boys, but they ran off and left me, and as darkness hurried in, I suddenly realised how far from home I was. — John Burnside

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story. — John Burnside

That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it. — John Burnside

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds. — John Burnside

Where logic seems apparent: in bullfrogs or Black-Eyed Susans bird migrations patterns on the skin of newt or carp we go too far imagining a god of purposes. — John Burnside

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation. — John Burnside

I think humans have to learn a new way of dwelling on this earth. A way of living with their companions: animals, plants and fish. — John Burnside

Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful. — John Burnside

What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth. — John Burnside

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. — John Burnside

Given the right information to help them decide, people will opt for conditions that benefit our creaturely neighbours, even where they have no particular interest in larks or cuckoo wasps - because those conditions benefit us. — John Burnside

[ ... ] and the barred owl calls from the well of my mind,
more echo than thought, as it fades through the wind
and flickers away to the silence beyond
like that voice, in myself, of another. — John Burnside

Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines. — John Burnside

I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac. — John Burnside

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: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality. — John Burnside

I remember playing the Mad Hatter in a school play and feeling very comfortable in the character. — John Burnside

With all the goodwill and local initiative in the world, we are not about to rewild anything until we change our way of thinking about our place in the creaturely world. — John Burnside

People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself. — John Burnside

One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890. — John Burnside

Growing up, I learnt to think, 'Let's make it a big night tonight, as you never know what's going to happen next.' So now I have enough, I take too much; when I get the chance to have a fine dinner, I will. And it's had an effect on my health. — John Burnside

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer. — John Burnside

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. — John Burnside

The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email. — John Burnside

The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned. — John Burnside

Today, however, she didn't go looking for urchins or broken shells. She simply walked to the end of the earth and stood a while. — John Burnside

I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever. — John Burnside

Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible. — John Burnside

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. — John Burnside

I moved south when I was 11 years old, moved to England. I've lived in all kinds of places, all parts of England. — John Burnside

When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks. — John Burnside

We do not need to be heroes to save the world; all we need is humility, a critical view of the commercial and political interests of those who would mislead us into wrongdoing, and a sense of wonder. — John Burnside

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic. — John Burnside

but the young dead stay with us, they color our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them. Yet — John Burnside

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 — John Burnside

The conventional, and painfully artificial, separation of the human realm from the natural other is bound to perish, albeit over a period of time, until we are obliged to learn how to cultivate our gardens under the most demanding conditions. — John Burnside

The fabric of a garden is determined as much by its textures as by its tonal range and architectural flair. — John Burnside

As a child, I was always intrigued by the question: what is it that distinguishes a city from a town? Is it size? Population? Location? When I asked grown-ups, the confident answer was that a city has to have a cathedral - which, to a child raised in a devout Catholic setting, made sense. — John Burnside

I have always been suspicious of the phrase, the glow of pregnancy, and my suspicions were only confirmed by Lillian's appearance. Instead of a glow, her whole body seemed to become more and more dull, sallow and sickly sweet and vague, like a candle burning out or a line of smudged writing. — John Burnside

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence. — John Burnside

Sadly, bird illustration has always been an under-appreciated art. — John Burnside

Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn't think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty. — John Burnside

Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down. — John Burnside

It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors - and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life. — John Burnside

When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative, and I realised I knew nothing about my father's circumstances other than what he'd told me. — John Burnside

What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor. — John Burnside

I have never understood why so many gardeners favour straight lines and narrow, regulated borders; perhaps they think wildness could work only in a larger space. — John Burnside

I really like to try my hand at everything, and I think it's probably dangerous to let oneself be pigeon-holed, not necessarily by other people, but in one's own mind. — John Burnside

There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have ever seen. The world's highest tides wash its shores, and the soft cliffs of Blomidon Provincial Park are constantly crumbling away; whole trees will occasionally slide down to the sea to decay slowly in the wind and brine. — John Burnside

For a bird, especially for the more musically inventive, song is the defining characteristic, the primary way by which it knows itself and is known by others. To lose its species song is to lose not just its identity but some part of its presence in the world. — John Burnside