Antarctica Quotes

“But imagine this, for a moment. If an asteroid happened to hit one of the rare remaining older surfaces; if its strike were glancing enough that it didn’t pulverise the surface, but forceful enough that it ejected a chunk of rock with an escape velocity of 12,000 mph; if that chunk, flung out into space, wandered aimlessly for a million years or two before feeling the gravitational tug of a nearby planet; if it tore through the atmosphere of that planet in a blaze of glory and landed on one of the planet’s frozen ice caps; if the chunk was buried in snow, squeezed, shoved and harried until it re-emerged, blinking, into the strangely blue daylight; and if, tens of thousands of years later a few local bipeds happened upon it, might it contain signs of alien life? If so, it would surely become one of the most exciting pieces of real estate in the entire Solar System.”
― Gabrielle Walker, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent

“Perhaps there will be a slight streak of green, a patch that will deepen and then grow. Then another patch on the horizon, like a green searchlight. And then shivering curtains of light can fill the sky, or looping spirals, or flickering flames of green and purple, and candy-apple red. It feels as if they should be accompanied by dramatic sounds, the bangs of fireworks or the roars of rockets. But these are utterly silent, almost solemn in their dancing. And yet they can be comforting in their own way; as if in this remote and frozen wilderness there's something else out there that is alive.”
― Gabrielle Walker, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent

“The most experienced Antarcticans talk not about conquering the continent but about surrendering to it. No matter how powerful you believe yourself to be—how good your technology, how rich your invention—Antarctica is always bigger. And if we humans look honestly into this ice mirror, and see how small we are, we may learn a humility that is the first step towards wisdom.”
― Gabrielle Walker, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent

“was at this point that Mawson remembered the lines from Robert Service’s poem ‘The Quitter’: Just have one more try—it’s dead easy to die
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.”
― Gabrielle Walker, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent

“the noise raised itself from a rumour to a roar; it sounded unhinged, like a cackling orchestra of kazoos.”
― Gabrielle Walker, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent