Scottish - Writer | March 19, 1955 -
One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.
John Burnside
BeautifulWolfMaskSeenMadeMost
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.
LifeAnimalImpossibleFindSpirit
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.
LearningSchoolPreparationRemember
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.
LifeGreatAnimalFeelWaveEarth
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.
AloneExperienceAnimalExerciseNow
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.
HomeDarknessChildhoodMeWalking
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.
BirdsGoNowMoreStillPesticides
If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.
NatureHomeWayQuestionMustOnly
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.
LifeNatureHistoryGreenWayMore
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.
WorkFamilyFatherColdOldYears
Thatcherite economic policy was most acutely felt in the coal industry, where tens of thousands of jobs were lost as pits were shut down.
DownLostPolicyIndustryEconomic
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict John Burnside quotes