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

“When he'd joined the police force, he had never expected to find a body. Or not like this, at least. People died in the Innertown all the time, as they die elsewhere. They died of strokes, old age, lung disease. Occasionally, they killed themselves, or were made strange by some random accident. Morrison had already had his fair share of those, and he'd been obliged to deal with the aftermath, or make notes, or stand at the edge of some family's bewilderment and grief and pretend he had a reason to be there. Mostly, though, his neighbors died privately, with no need for an official presence, and Morrison was as removed from those deaths as he was from their other secrets. Some of them died from causes that were, and would forever remain, unknown, because no authority on earth wanted to determine what those causes were. The Innertown wasn't a healthy place to live; the trouble was that, for most people, there was nowhere else to go. This was why so many also died of things that no doctor could have diagnosed- disappointment, anger, fear, loneliness. Not being touched. Not being loved. Silence.”
― John Burnside, The Glister

“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