Quotes by : John Burnside

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they....

The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating.....

If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language....

If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big....

It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision.....

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking,....

The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into....

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before....

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they....