List of John McPhee Quotes

He Liked To Go From A To B Without Inventing Letters Between.

He (dave Brower) Is An Emotionalist In An Age Of Dangerous Reason.

I Used To Sit In Class And Listen To The Terms Come Floating Down The Room Like Paper Airplanes.

Nonfiction-wha T The Hell, That Just Says, This Is Nongrapefruit We're Having This Morning.

The Doctor Listens In With A Stethoscope And Hears Sounds Of A Warpath Indian Drum.

A Quarter-horse Jockey Learns To Think Of A Twenty-second Race As If It Were Occurring Across Twenty Minutes--in Distinct Parts, Spaced In His Consciousness. Each Nuance Of The Ride Comes To Him As He Builds His Race. If You Can Do The Opposite With Deep Time, Living In It And Thinking In It Until The Large Numbers Settle Into Place, You Can Sense How Swiftly The Initial Earth Packed Itself Together, How Swiftly Continents Have Assembled And Come Apart, How Far And Rapidly Continents Travel, How Quickly Mountains Rise And How Quickly They Disintegrate And Disappear.

The Summit Of Mount Everest Is Marine Limestone.

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.

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.

Catch And Release Fishing May Be Cruelty Masquerading As Political Correctness

I Can't Stand A Sentence Until It Sounds Right.

Travel By Canoe Is Not A Necessity, And Will Nevermore Be The Most Efficient Way To Get From One Region To Another, Or Even From One Lake To Another Anywhere. A Canoe Trip Has Become Simply A Rite Of Oneness With Certain Terrain, A Diversion Off The Field, An Art Performed Not Because It Is A Necessity But Because There Is Value In The Art Itself.