Sandstone Quotes

• Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets.

  Loren Eiseley

  Lonely, Wine, Sunset

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• Living there [Horse Mesa] was like living in a natural cathedral. Waking up every morning, you walked outside and looked down at the blue lake, then up at the sandstone cliffs--those awe-inspiring layers of red and yellow rock shaped over the millennia, with dozens of black-streaked crevices that temporarily became waterfalls after rainstorms.

  Jeannette Walls

  Morning, Horse, Lakes

  Jeannette Walls (2009). “Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel”, p.245, Simon and Schuster

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• I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Home, Cutting, Rocks

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

  David Abram

  Summer, Rain, Winter

  20 Copy quote

• The house had a name. The Banana House. It was carved onto a piece of sandstone above the front door. It made no sense to anyone.

  Hilary McKay

  Doors, Names, House

  Hilary McKay (2002). “Saffy's Angel”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

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• In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.

  Edward Abbey

  Nature, Blood, Hands

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.

  Peter Weir

  Bird, Tree, Hammers

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• Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.

  Loren Eiseley

  Beach, Stars, Real

  Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Firmament of Time: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.39, Library of America

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• None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

  Steven Erikson

  Confusion, Secret, Crumbling

  4 Copy quote

• One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.

  Alan Lightman

  Time, Church Bells, Years

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.25, Vintage

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• The usual struggle squeezing my bloated Citroën, absurdly named “Picasso,” in or out of any old Italian town. I should be taking a year over this and doing it on a donkey. Eventually found the road to the church of the Madonna of San Biagio, a foursquare temple sitting all alone in the plain. Sangallo's fantasy of the Doric order in honey-colored sandstone, with shell-niches, rosettes, oculi under heavy entablatures. Any one ignorant of geometry scarcely dare enter this shrine to number, measure, and weight. So clean and crisp I could eat it for breakfast.

  Joscelyn Godwin

  Struggle, Italian, Order

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