Quotes from 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.

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)

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.

This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame.

No poem lovely as a tree, she said (though I'd never once thought to compare)

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.

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.

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.

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...

As the Scholar says, blame the individual, and the problem persists; analyse the system, and you're already one step closer to finding a solution.

But it takes nothing away from self-sufficiency to be able to work with like-minded souls and, as we have all learned, a community is strengthened when its people deal with hardship together.

cómo clama la tierra por cada muerto mientras da manzanas, topos fugaces, minúsculos pájaros

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns von der Gegenwart distanzieren, weshalb wir niemals ganz der Realität der Dinge habhaft werden, machen sie die Vergangenheit zur absoluten Fiktion.

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.

This girl - this thin, cold child in a hand-me-down cardigan and faded dress - hated me, not for anything I was or had done, but because I existed, in her world, and she didn't want me there.

and she had started to relax - but she was relaxing into something terrible, and she was going about the world in a state of complete indifference to whatever might come, a wild girl with dream patterns and faint, dark animals etched on her skin, a creature who had passed beyond fear and was, therefore, beyond saving.

Non avevo mai avuto l'impressione di crescere all'ombra di mia madre: vivevo nel mio mondo, uno spazio di cui lei aveva delimitato i confini, lasciandomi però libera di riempirlo come meglio credevo. Mia madre viveva come aveva scelto di vivere, e sapevo che il lavoro era la cosa che contava di più per lei, ma questo consentiva anche a me di vivere come volevo e di decidere liberamente cosa contava di più per me...

Faced with a real fight, most animals will compromise. If the odds look bad, one or another will back off, or the fight will be discontinued by mutual consent. Humans are the only animals prepared to fight for a Pyrrhic victory.

Sometimes you linger days upon a word, a single, uncontaminated drop of sound; for days it trembles, liquid to the mind, then falls: mere denotation dimming the undertow of language.

Denn das ist ja das Wunderbare an Eigenbrötlern: Sie sind Enthusiasten. Wer selbst kein Leben hat, kann irgendwas leidenschaftlich lieben, und kein Mensch macht einem deshalb Vorhaltungen.

Ist doch mal wieder typisch dafür, wie es auf der Welt zugeht: Die Leute, die Bücher lieben, können sie sich nicht leisten, während die Leute, die genügend Geld haben, Betriebswirtschaft studieren, damit sie noch mehr Geld einsacken und dafür sorgen können, dass die Buchleser auch in Zukunft machtlos bleiben. Dem armen Volk bleibt nur die öffentliche Bibliothek.

What we were after there, in the horn and vellum

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.

couldn't find it in my heart to believe her death would result in a complete annihilation; I think I accepted her body's death from the beginning, but there was another part of me that believed her mind, or her spirit, or something else that could not be defined, would never really