Quotes from John McPhee

The home terms still apply. 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.

If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away . . . continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden of fireflies.

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

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.

They sold box turtles by the gross to people in Philadelphia, who used the turtles to keep cellars free of snails—a market that has declined.

The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.

You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write.

He flings pros into the air like skeet, and one by one he shatters them with cons.

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.

The group was known as Agassiz's Club, more officially as the Saturday Club. One summer, when the club went off to the Adirondacks on a camping trip, Longfellow refused to go, because Emerson was taking a gun. "Somebody will be shot," said Longfellow, explaining that Emerson was too vague to be trusted with a gun.

This, after all, was Switzerland, where everything works; Switzerland, where trains run like clocks, and clocks run like watches, and watches are synchronous with the pulse of the universe; Switzerland

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...

Since you may take a month, or ten months, or several years to turn one idea into a piece of writing

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.

well. planned

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

lithosphere

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

His general shotmaking ability is optimum. He will try anything. "Look at the way he hit that ball, gave it the casual play," Graebner says to himself. "Instead of trying a silly shot and missing it, he tries a silly shot and makes it." If Ashe wins the next point, he will have broken Graebner, and the match will be, in effect, even.

This is the only place in the whole Rocky Mountain front where you can go from the Great Plains to the summit of the mountains without snaking your way up a mountain face or going through a tunnel. This one feature had more to do with the building of the West than any other factor. I don't diminish the importance of the Oregon Trail, but here you had everything going for you. This point hasn't been made before.

Norman Maclean called A River Runs Through It fiction, and the word "fiction" appeared in the book's front matter. A River Runs Through It was autobiographical fact in nearly all aspects but one. For private reasons, the author had shifted the site of his brother's murder and, being Norman Maclean, considered that change and others quite enough fabrication to disqualify the text as nonfiction.

Pourchot, after breakfast, goes off to measure the largest of the spruce near the campsite. He finds a tree twenty-two inches in diameter, breast high. ...Pourchot says he will write in his report that there is one tree of such girth. 'Otherwise, the Forest Service might think there's timber here.

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.

The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don't use the lead.