John Burnside Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'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.
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What we should be doing is saving habitats, not single species, no matter what their cuteness factor.
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As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
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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.
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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.'
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Sometimes, when the wind hits hard and icicles form on the sea cliffs, we can all come together - and at those times, we are at our best.
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I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac.
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I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.
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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.
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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 game.
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The older I get, the happier my childhood becomes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.