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John Burnside Quotes


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Quotes by John Burnside

Showing 81-90 of 95 Quotes by John Burnside

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.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.

~John Burnside

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For the Yupik, all life was continuous, animal with human with 'spirit', and recognising that continuum allowed them to undergo transformations that we, locked into our own disappointingly Cartesian skins, find impossible even to imagine.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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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.

~John Burnside

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Biography

Nationality: Scottish

Type: Writer

Born: March 19th, 1955

Links

Find John Burnside on Amazon

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