John McPhee Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

A roadcut is to a geologist as a stethoscope is to a doctor.

John McPhee
The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop 'granite.' They say 'granodiorite' when they are in church and 'granite' the rest of the week.

John McPhee
The doctor listens in with a stethoscope and hears sounds of a warpath Indian drum.

John McPhee
He liked to go from A to B without inventing letters between.

John McPhee
Geologists, in their all but closed conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw, scenes of global sweep, gone and gone again, including seas, mountains, rivers, forests, and archipelagoes of aching beauty rising in volcanic violence to settle down quietly and then forever disappear — almost disappear.

John McPhee
There was, to be sure, another side of the page - full of geological language of the sort that would have attracted Gilbert and Sullivan.

John McPhee
Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness

John McPhee
Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion off the field, an art performed not because it is a necessity but because there is value in the art itself.

John McPhee
With your arms spread wide... to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrists, and the Permian extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

John McPhee
Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.

John McPhee
If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

John McPhee
On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information.

John McPhee
You see the rivers running east. Then you see mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. When they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years.

John McPhee
I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.

John McPhee
A pedestrian today in Juneau, head down and charging, can be stopped for no gain by the wind.

John McPhee
If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

John McPhee
In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

John McPhee
Some miners' wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.

John McPhee