John Burnside Quotes

I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.

Greenland is a wonderful country.

The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.

Ledger art represents a spirit which has lasted through the hardships and turmoil. It is my goal and ambition that this style of pictograph art continues to pay tribute to the perseverance of my ancestors who adapted and created works of art during a period of life changing turmoil and injustice.

Winnipeg has the largest collection of Inuit art in the world, I believe. They can be quite simple in a great way and often have sparse backgrounds and isolated characters. They often have a really great look to them.

I've been very influenced by Inuit art especially some drawings and watercolors I've seen.

I always think of the Pacific Northwest as giant trees, and rain, and clouds and dampness, like the Native American art from that area.

The celebrated Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira loved the Ghost Gums of the Northern Territory... They are evocatively Australian, their white trunks contrasting with the red earth and the deep blue sky of the Dreamtime region that has for centuries sustained Namatjira's Aranda people.

Permafrost in the soil [is melting], in the boreal and arctic areas in the world, and, probably even more alarming in the last six or eight months, the data on what is happening to the ice shelves in Greenland and the west Antarctic has begun to cause people to radically reassess the earlier conviction that those ice shelves were stable on a kind of century-long time scale.

He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.

There is a historic strain of dominion theology which says, taking its references from the Psalms, that man is made just a little lower than God, and that we are the crown of creation. That interpretation has come at the expense of the one that says when God, in the story of Noah, intervened to save human life against the flood, against the acts of nature, He did not stop with human beings. He made sure that every kind of animal was represented twice on that ark.

The local shepherd, I vividly remember his old Barbour jacket, with a hipflask in the pocket. It just feels very familiar - like part of my childhood. The smell of the wax. Whenever I put one on now, it just feels comforting.

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

I come from way north. We'd listen to radio shows all the time. I think I was the last generation, or pretty close to the last one, that grew up without TV.

Man is no man, but a wolf

The Danes are causing a bit of trouble. The kingdom of Denmark claimed the North Pole as their own. Hey, you can't just reach out and take something if you want it, Denmark. That's Russia's job.

The wolf is living for the earth.

Mass production is nothing new. Weren't cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids?... Paintings can be painted with the left hand, the right hand, someone else's hand, or many people's hands. The scale of production is irrelevant to its content.

A bad dog never sees the Wolfe.

I think it's always good to learn a craft from scratch the real way, so that you've learned it from the basis, the raw bones, and then you have that to fall back on. I personally wouldn't want it any other way.

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they're happy.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.

The goat, for us, is an image that's stuck in our heads since we were kids, coming from Iowa people are like 'Beware the horned goat of satan!' and all that. It's bullshit. It's just an animal.