John Burnside > Quotes

“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, The Glister

“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, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir

“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, A Summer of Drowning

“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, Selected Poems

“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, A Summer of Drowning

“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, The Dumb House

“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 initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfillment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It's not a question of predestination, it's just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craftwork of the soul.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“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, The Glister

“No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“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, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir

“As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…”
― John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir

“انسان‌ها تنها گونه‌ی حیوانات‌اند که حاضرند به قیمت شکست برای پیروزی بجنگند.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language were words and grammar.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“And I wake, in the cage of my bones,
on the same cold ground.”
― 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, A Summer of Drowning

“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, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)”
― John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir

“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

“for as long as I have known it, the plant has been empty and silent, a vast labyrinth of corridors and abandoned rooms, some open to the sky, others with glass or metal roofing and, above each kiln—we call them kilns, but there's no real evidence to say what they were used for—a giant chimney rises up into the clouds, a wide brick chimney that, in the wet months, fills with great cascading falls of rain, just as the glass roofs and the sheets of corrugated metal on the storerooms will break into a music that sounds repetitious when you first hear it, but soon begins to reveal itself as an infinitely complex fabric of faint overtones and distant harmonics that is never quite the same from one moment to the next.”
― John Burnside, The Glister

“What we were after there, in the horn and vellum”
― John Burnside, Black Cat Bone

“Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dumfermline lost at home(p. 83-84)”
― John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir

“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, or fame, or the regard of others. No; if you had to lose everything – I mean EVERYTHING – it would be the things you most take for granted now that you would miss. It would be different for each person, and it would probably surprise you to know what it was: a lilac tree in flower, the sound of a train in the distance, the smell of marmalade or hot buttered toast. Rain on a windowpane. A fruit thingummy.”
― 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, The Dumb House

“It might sound sentimental to say it in so many words, but we are blessed by the dead, and we know that we are, in spite of our protestations to the contrary. They leave spaces in our lives that, for some of us, are the closest things to sacred we ever know. They are there and then they are gone and, after a time, we come to see a certain elegance in that – the elegance of a magic trick, say, where the conjuror rehearses the vanishing act that we must all accomplish sooner or later.”
― John Burnside, I Put a Spell on You

“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, The Dumb House

“[...] freier Wille und Schicksal sind nichts als Illusion, falsche Gegensätze, Trostpflaster. Letzten Endes sind sie sogar ein und dasselbe: ein einziger Prozess. Man wählt, was man wählt, es könnte nie anders sein: Die Entscheidung ist das Schicksal. Das Ergebnis ist von Anfang an bestimmt, jede Alternative, die man in Erwägung zieht, nur eine absurde Ausflucht, denn es liegt in unserer Natur, eher die eine als die andere Entscheidung zu fällen. Ebendies bedeutet Identität. Von Freiheit und Bestimmung zu reden ist abwegig, da dies suggeriert, es gebe etwas außerhalb von einem selbst, das das Leben bestimmte, obwohl es letztlich doch allein darauf hinausläuft: Identität – Kunsthandwerk der Seele.”
― John Burnside

“No poem lovely
as a tree, she said
(though I’d never once thought to compare)”
― John Burnside, Still Life With Feeding Snake

“This is why the past seems perfect, a time of proportion and order, because it is immersed in speech. For animals, memory might reside as a sensation, a resonance in the nerves, or in the meat of the spine. But for humans, the past cannot be described except in words. It is nowhere else.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“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, The Glister: A Novel

“The mainstream reader knows what he wants, and that is entertainment with a veneer of "the real," the challenge of a problem that he can solve, a soupcon of flattery, and a dollop of sex (just as long as it's grey). What such a reader doesn't want is an invitation to change his life, or a clear exposition of how rotten the system is, a la Henry Miller, because as my friend says, that is depressing. To write outside the mainstream, to diagnose the system's ills, to lay your heart and your spirit out on the page, is lonely work, but it feels lonelier still to think you did it all for nothing.”
― John Burnside