121 Quotes by John Burnside

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

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]

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…

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]

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)

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

No Memory happens in the past. To say this in so many words is, no doubt, to state the obvious - our memories happen now, in the madeleine- and tisane-tinctured present - but it strikes me as peculiar, still, that my recollections have so little to do with historical time.

Nothing seems more beautiful to me than language when it creats the impression of order.

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.