A Quote by John Burnside

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.
The hardest thing I've had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none.
Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
Growing up I played piano and I sang at a lot of weddings; I grew up in a very small town, a little coal-mining town in Virginia called Grundy. And my family was very sing-songy at home.
'Rocket Boys,' for one reason or the other, just happened to strike a chord across country and across world, maybe because it's set in a little coal-mining town. That's why NASA likes it - most of the engineers come from towns very similar.
The commencement of coal mining at Parsa Kente is a milestone event in coal mining sector.
It seems the EPA has worked hard to devise new regulations that are designed to eliminate coal mining, coal burning, usage of coal.
Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.
Before he went to sleep, I told him a little story about a rabbit we saw run around the beach house we rented.
I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.
My father got a job at Bradford University in textiles. And he came for - I guess, you know, why do people immigrate? - like, for a better life to find, you know, a new world. And, you know, I think he always - he saw it as an opportunity. And so yeah so we came to this coal mining town in the north of England and that's where I grew up.
Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.
We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.
My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight.
The kingdom of birds is divided into two departments - birds and House Sparrows. House Sparrows are not real birds - they are little beasts!
I remember going to see my dad pitch against other coal-mining teams, and he was successful with the knuckleball. I saw how bad guys would look like swinging, and how guys talked about how he could throw every day and didn't hurt his arm. That's how I grew up learning.
Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.
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