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)
Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
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Chris Hedges
A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.
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Steven Galloway
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
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Naomi Klein
When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.
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Brian K. Vaughan
As for the military advantage of such a bombardment, I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasure the brains with which they were spattered. I have seen a janitor's...
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Anonymous
More Quotes By John Burnside
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
The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.
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…
If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big house, or the fancy car, assuming you had such things. It wouldn't be your impeccable reputation, or fame, or the regard of others. No; if you...
