Words matter. These are the best John Burnside Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo’s messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.
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.
I remember when I first encountered anthropocentrism. I was in primary school and, in preparation for our confirmation, the class was learning about the afterlife.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
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.
Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it’s very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
For 10 years, I gave away my possessions every year and moved on to a new place.
As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous ‘instinct for happiness’ is never the whole story.
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
I’m an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac.
I remember playing the Mad Hatter in a school play and feeling very comfortable in the character.
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.
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.
As a child, I was consumed with a near-obsessive curiosity about what the world felt like for other creatures.
My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country’s finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.
‘The Asylum Dance’ was written after I’d moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife.
You can’t sit down and decide what you want to write about.
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.
I don’t like the term ‘mental illness.’ I’d rather just say ‘mad.’ Just like I always say ‘loony bin,’ not ‘mental hospital.’
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.
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 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.
Clearly, any well-kept garden will be a source of pleasure in the summer months; in the bleak urban midwinter, however, there are few activities more likely to energise the spirit than a botanical walk.
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.
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.
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.
It’s important to have quiet time and isolation.
Poetry stands or falls by its music.
My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
