Richard Fortey Quotes

#1. I confess that the idea of taking off one's boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.

Richard Fortey

#2. Later ... the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of carabids.

Richard Fortey

#3. But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.

Richard Fortey

#4. In the beginning there was dust, and one day the great, improbable experiment of life will return to dust. We are not secure. Just as our ultimate genesis was entangled with the birth of suns, and the terrifying tumult of asteroids and meteorites, so we are still bound to the cosmos.

Richard Fortey

#5. When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: 'I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.' They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One

Richard Fortey

#6. My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself
for money.

Richard Fortey

#7. Mankind is nothing more than a parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate is clement. But the present arrangement of land and sea will change, and with it our brief supremacy.

Richard Fortey

#8. You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

Richard Fortey

#9. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.

Richard Fortey

#10. It is not necessary to be large to be a perfectly good arthropod (or mollusc, come to that).

Richard Fortey

#11. Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"
I never did find out what that meant.

Richard Fortey

#12. Ralph Waldo Emerson could write (in The Conduct of Life, 1860): 'The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.' Mountains

Richard Fortey

#13. I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.

Richard Fortey

#14. A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.

Richard Fortey

#15. I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.

Richard Fortey

#16. And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.

Richard Fortey

#17. I doubt whether there would be many readers for a post-holocaust novel that was concerned with the hero's desperate search for a mite. But alas for the world if the mites and their diminutive allies failed to prosper!

Richard Fortey

#18. Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era: who are we johnny-come-latelies to label them as either 'primitive' or 'unsuccessful'? Men have so far survived half a per cent as long. There

Richard Fortey

#19. The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.

Richard Fortey

#20. For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars

Richard Fortey

#21. There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.

Richard Fortey

#22. Quite soon my office was a jumble of broken bits of rocks, and needles, and old monographs, all coated in fine, limy dust. I still work in an identical office today. Tidy people's eyes go all peculiar when they come into it. I have a special small padded seat for them to collapse into.

Richard Fortey