John Burnside Quotes

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

I don't even recognize myself sometimes.

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

That's all I want, to keep losing myself.

I don't recognize my former self. Like I'm on the outside looking in at my life. Who is that guy?

I've had a great metamorphosis in my life. I struggled for a number of years because I was identified with that image of the Seventies.

I don't feel like a 40-year-old. I feel more like four 10-year-olds, each pulling in a different direction.

I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by and obsessed with. My true self.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

I look at that person and I'm like, That's not Kelli White. That's not who I am, who I started out to be.

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

I don't know how happy I was when I met Sting. I always had this difficulty of not really knowing who I was.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture and he had revealed I was a puzzle and had taken me apart and put me back together again.

During those formative times, I really didn't know what was going on, and I was sort of torn in a thousand different directions with how I felt about what I was doing.

First I was 'angry,' then 'spiritual.' Now I don't know what I am.

I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very much as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and I'm glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a lot of people I know today.

When did I stop being me?

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

Behind my work was ambition, behind my love was personality, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power. Now they are vanishing and I drift. I come, Mother, I come, in Thy warm bosom, floating wheresoever Thou takest me, in the voiceless, in the strange, in the wonderland, I come - a spectator, no more an actor.

It's not easy to be Light when you've been Dark. It's almost too much to ask anyone. -Macon Ravenwood