Basin and Range 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, Basin and Range

“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, Basin and Range

“A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

“I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

“Certain English geologists produced confusion by embracing continental drift and then drawing up narratives and maps that showed continents moving all over the earth with respect to a fixed and undriftable England.”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

“The authors of literary works may not have intended all the subtleties, complexities, undertones, and overtones that are attributed to them by critics and by students writing doctoral theses."
"That's what God says about geologists," I told him...”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

“There are dark, hard, cherty silt-stones from some deep ocean trench full of rapidly accumulating Pennsylvanian guck.”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range