John Burnside Quotes

Going to the Arctic was immense for me.

In Finland in the winter, when the sky is totally choked with clouds, the country becomes one big sensory deprivation tank.

Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive!

The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God's creation we have made no effort to tame.

Were I laid on Greenland's Coast, And in my Arms embrac'd my Lass; Warm amidst eternal Frost, Too soon the Half Year's Night would pass.

The light in Alaska in particular is so beautiful. So beautiful! Such incredible light.

We do not even see the sun for several months in the north of Sweden.

Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.

Like any traveler, I'm always looking for those experiences that are almost unique to any place, and watching films around Alaska of the skies in winter made me want to taste those unworldly showers of light in person.

There's one place, and one place only, to see polar bears in America. You have to travel to the country's northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska's North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik.

The whole band is from Alaska. It's like growing up anywhere else.

That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before. Suddenly I was staying there and hiking there, and we took a mini iceberg out of the water and chipped it up and used it as ice cubes and made cocktails with it. It's surreal.

Before we left, Grandmother talked a lot about the arctic night we would fly through. 'Isn't it a mystical word, "arctic"? Pure and quite hard. And meridians. Isn't that pretty? We're going to fly along them, faster than the light can follow us... Time won't be able to catch us.

Norway, too, has noble prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!

Siberia is a state of mind.

People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist.

I grew up on a tiny little island.

To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.

To experience the northern forest in the raw, I went to northern Finland and Lapland, travelling on horseback, and sleeping on reindeer skins in the traditional open-fronted Finnish laavu. I ate elk heart, reindeer and lingonberries, and tried out spruce resin: the chewing gum of the Stone Age.

I like to live in places that are kind of off in the cuts so people can't really find me even if they wanted to.

It was as far as I could send him ..., where he could do the least harm. I would have sent him to the North Pole if we had kept a minister there.

My parents live in the part of the United States that is Canada. It is so far north that Minnesota lies in the same direction as Miami. They have four distinct seasons: Winter, More Winter, Still More Winter, and That One Day Of Summer.

We were working under very harsh conditions on 'Zero Kelvin.' We were up there in the Arctic, closer to the North Pole than to a hospital. Sometimes you had to sleep in small Arctic tents with guns to protect yourself from polar bears and stuff.

Wyoming - God bless you in Wyoming - it's very boring, and it's the most isolated place on Earth.

My favorite spot is the Maldives. Since I travel so much for work, I like to go to places that are very secluded and quiet.