John McPhee Quotes

• 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

  Motivational, Writing, Marine

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.127, Macmillan

  56 Copy quote

• Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.

  John McPhee

  Book, Vocabulary, Rocks

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.164, Macmillan

  28 Copy quote

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

  John McPhee

  War, Loss, Winning

  "The Control of Nature". Book by John McPhee, 1989.

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Forever, Way

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.88, Macmillan

  21 Copy quote

• 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.

  John McPhee

  Thinking, Islands, Race

  25 Copy quote

• Taking things from one source is plagiarism; taking things from several sources is research.

  John McPhee

  Research, Plagiarism, Source

  19 Copy quote

• When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. 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

  Ocean, Moving, Writing

  "Basin and Range". Book by John McPhee, 1981; reprinted in his book "Annals of the Former World", 1998.

  28 Copy quote

• A writer has to have some kind of compulsive drive to do his work. If you don't have it, you'd better find another kind of work, because it's the only compulsion that will drive you through the psychological nightmares of writing.

  John McPhee

  Writing, Nightmare, Kind

  22 Copy quote

• Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life

  John McPhee

  Writing, Order, Suspension

  19 Copy quote

• With their four-dimensional minds, and in their interdisciplinary ultra verbal way, geologists can wiggle out of almost anything.

  John McPhee

  Mind, Four, Way

  37 Copy quote

• On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

  John McPhee

  Keys, Long, Water

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Lakes, Oneness

  John McPhee (1982). “The Survival of the Bark Canoe”, p.34, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  20 Copy quote

• I can't stand a sentence until it sounds right.

  John McPhee

  Writing, Sound, Sentences

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Church, Enthusiasm, Affection

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.22, Macmillan

  15 Copy quote

• Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness

  John McPhee

  Sea, Fishing, Rivers

  John McPhee (2003). “The Founding Fish”, p.330, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

• The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.

  John McPhee

  Marine, Limestone, Summit

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  John McPhee

  Horse, Thinking, Opposites

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Colonels

  John McPhee (1996). “The Second John McPhee Reader”, p.19, Macmillan

  11 Copy quote

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

  John McPhee

  Morning, Nonfiction, Hell

  5 Copy quote

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

  John McPhee

  Doctors, Sound, Stethoscope

  John McPhee (2011). “Table of Contents”, p.77, Macmillan

  25 Copy quote

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

  John McPhee

  Airplane, Class, Floating

  John McPhee (1982). “Basin and Range”, p.25, Macmillan

  10 Copy quote

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

  John McPhee

  Age, Reason, Dave

  4 Copy quote

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

  John McPhee

  Letters, Action, Inventing

  John McPhee (2011). “The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed”, p.42, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

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