John McPhee Quotations

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

The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.

He (Dave Brower) is an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason.

A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes--in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear.

Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning.

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

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

On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time. ... Geologists ... see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the Earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s across the sky ... Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

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.

Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness