Quotes About Earthquakes

There's been a lot of really great intensive research into earthquakes, but we can't predict an earthquake down to the day. We can't predict where a hurricane is going to be a month in advance.

That strange mixture that's always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.

Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid - From the short story Thailand

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

Es algo muy extraño. Me refiero a los terremotos. Nosotros estamos firmemente convencidos de que, bajo nuestros piel, la tierra es algo consistenre, sólido, inamovible. Existe incluso la expresión . Sin embargo, un día, de repente nos damos cuenta de que no es así. La tierra y las rocas, que se suponían sólidas, se reblandecen.

By law the life-insurance companies were not required to pay on deaths caused by earthquakes. But in Japan the law often comes second–in 1923 the insurance companies were ordered to pay money they didn't owe. In a crisis no Japanese company is really private; the insurance companies have been effectively nationalized. They have been told to pay whatever they can without depleting their domestic-securities portfolios. It is their peculiar charm that they don't argue.

But the thing is, most of the time bad things don't happen. Rocks don't fall. Earthquakes don't occur. New vents don't suddenly open up. For all the instability, it's mostly remarkably and amazingly tranquil.

activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: 'The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region' (Independent). Just make it 'a week of earthquakes'.

When molten rock (magma) pushes up through the sea floor, it forces tectonic plates to spread apart, or diverge, creating valleys known as rifts.

Chile's mines are very dangerous; the country has a lot of earthquakes.

Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.

Many of the most interesting phenomena that we have touched upon fall into this category, including the occurrence of disasters such as earthquakes, financial market crashes, and forest fires. All of these have fat-tail distributions with many more rare events, such as enormous earthquakes, large market crashes, and raging forest fires, than would have been predicted by assuming that they were random events following a classic Gaussian distribution.

I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. "And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community—people who are in difficulty—tend to be communities that do not evolve. When they do evolve, it's generally by a very strong commotion, a revolution.

If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease] or earthquakes.

He thought about himself, and the whole Earth, Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars, How many miles the Moon might have in girth, Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies; And then he thought of Donna Julia's eyes.

At street corners, where walls join, I thought I could see some familiar features, like outlines of human faces, the shadows of cheekbones and eyebrows. They are really there, caught in stone for all time, along with the marks left by earthquakes, winters and scourges wrought by men.

It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.

It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.

I was gifted at birth with this talent, and I've tried to honor it all my life. And I did - through hell and storms and tsunamis and earthquakes. I've been through too much not to know that giving back is everything.