John McPhee Quotes

#1. 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

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

John McPhee

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

John McPhee

#4. I'm addicted to the entire planet. I don't want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells ...

John McPhee

#5. Mother like son' is a saying so true, the world will judge largely of mother by you.

John McPhee

#6. On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine - smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside.

John McPhee

#7. 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

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

John McPhee

#9. In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.

John McPhee

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

John McPhee

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

John McPhee

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

John McPhee

#13. 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

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

John McPhee

#15. Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.

John McPhee

#16. the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved. In

John McPhee

#17. Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness

John McPhee

#18. The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.

John McPhee

#19. George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose "Woodcraft," published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.

John McPhee

#20. Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.

John McPhee

#21. There are dark, hard, cherty silt-stones from some deep ocean trench full of rapidly accumulating Pennsylvanian guck.

John McPhee

#22. Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life

John McPhee

#23. Wood was the main source of energy in the world until the eighteen-fifties, and it still could be. Roughly a tenth of the annual growth of all the trees on earth could yield alcohol enough to run everything that now uses coal and petroleum - every airplane, every industry, every automobile.

John McPhee

#24. Some miners' wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.

John McPhee

#25. I wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, bad. And that's how I found out - by doing it.

John McPhee

#26. 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

#27. going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside - to say, 'This is the way it was.'

John McPhee

#28. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.

John McPhee

#29. The Courts of Justice had once ruled that a man carrying bagpipes was a man carrying a weapon - so inspiring was the music of the pipers to the clans in battle.

John McPhee

#30. He said, Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It's not, if you're mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater.

John McPhee

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

John McPhee

#32. 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

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

John McPhee

#34. When D's cabin caught fire, D was out of the country. Half the town-Christians and drinkers alike-came out to fight the fire and loot the cabin. There were individual piles of loot, and fights over the piles. "That's my pile." "The hell it is, it's mine.

John McPhee

#35. 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