The Glister Quotes

“That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it.”
― John Burnside, The Glister

“The definition of a page-turner really aught to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one.”
― John Burnside, The Glister

“for as long as I have known it, the plant has been empty and silent, a vast labyrinth of corridors and abandoned rooms, some open to the sky, others with glass or metal roofing and, above each kiln—we call them kilns, but there's no real evidence to say what they were used for—a giant chimney rises up into the clouds, a wide brick chimney that, in the wet months, fills with great cascading falls of rain, just as the glass roofs and the sheets of corrugated metal on the storerooms will break into a music that sounds repetitious when you first hear it, but soon begins to reveal itself as an infinitely complex fabric of faint overtones and distant harmonics that is never quite the same from one moment to the next.”
― John Burnside, The Glister

“but the young dead stay with us, they color our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them. Yet”
― John Burnside, The Glister: A Novel

“Ist doch mal wieder typisch dafür, wie es auf der Welt zugeht: Die Leute, die Bücher lieben, können sie sich nicht leisten, während die Leute, die genügend Geld haben, Betriebswirtschaft studieren, damit sie noch mehr Geld einsacken und dafür sorgen können, dass die Buchleser auch in Zukunft machtlos bleiben. Dem armen Volk bleibt nur die öffentliche Bibliothek.”
― John Burnside, The Glister