John McPhee Quotes & Sayings

Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness — John McPhee

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

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

On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time ... Geologists ... see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the Earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s across the sky ... Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death. — John McPhee

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

She has the sort of body you go to see in marble. She has golden hair. Quickly, deftly, she reaches with both hands behind her back and unclasps her top. Setting it on her lap, she swivels ninety degrees to face the towboat square. Shoulders back, cheeks high, she holds her pose without retreat. In her ample presentation there is defiance of gravity. There is no angle of repose. She is a siren and these are her songs. — John McPhee

Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning. — John McPhee

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

Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world. — John McPhee

There is no Weatherfax map on the Stella Lykes - only the barometer, the barographs, the teletypes from NOAA. The radar can see a storm, but that is like seeing a fist just before it hits you. When a storm is out there, somewhere, beyond the visible sky, the ship will let him know. "When you get close to a big storm, you can feel it. For some reason, the ship takes on almost a little uncertainty. She's almost like a live thing - like they say animals can sense bad weather coming. Sometimes I almost believe a ship can. I know that doesn't make sense, because she's steel and wood and metal, but she picks up a little uncertainty, probably something that is being transmitted through the water. It's hard to define. It's just a tiny little different motion, a little hesitancy, a little tremble from time to time." Off — John McPhee

Taking things from one source is plagiarism; taking things from several sources is research. — John McPhee

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

When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone. — John McPhee

I can't stand a sentence until it sounds right. — John McPhee

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

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

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

Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. — John McPhee

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

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

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

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

The doctor listens in with a stethoscope and hears sounds of a warpath Indian drum. — John McPhee

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

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

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

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning. — John McPhee

A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening
as the five of us did
it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971] — John McPhee

He liked to go from A to B without inventing letters between. — John McPhee

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

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

Now, at Suiattle Pass, Brower was still talking about butterflies. He said he had raised them from time to time and had often watched them emerge from the chrysalis
first a crack in the case, then a feeler, and in an hour a butterfly. He said he had felt that he wanted to help, to speed them through the long and awkward procedure; and he had once tried. The butterflies came out with extended abdomens, and their wings were balled together like miniature clenched fists. Nothing happened. They sat there until they died. 'I have never gotten over that,' he said. 'That kind of information is all over in the country, but it's not in town. — John McPhee

On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that's my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I'm going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that's the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket's going to have some water in it. — John McPhee

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

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

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

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

If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother's championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhereded to for four full years - in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day. — John McPhee

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

I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes. — John McPhee

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

Despite the recurrence of events in which the debris-basin system fails in its struggle to contain the falling mountains, people who live on the front line are for the most part calm and complacent. It appears that no amount of front-page or prime-time attention will ever prevent such people from masking out the problem. — John McPhee

From seaport to seaport, papers accumulate on the captain's desk. "Paperwork has become the bane of this job," he says. "If a ship doesn't have a good copying machine, it isn't seaworthy. The more ports, the more papers. South American paperwork is worse than the paperwork anywhere else in the world but the Arab countries and Indonesia." Deliberately, he allows the pile on his desk to rise until a deep roll on a Pacific swell throws it to the deck and scatters it from bulkhead to bulkhead. This he interprets as a signal that the time has come to do paperwork. The paper carpet may be an inch deep, but he leaves it where it fell. Bending over, he picks up one sheet. He deals with it: makes an entry, writes a letter - does whatever it requires him to do. Then he bends over and picks up another sheet. This goes on for a few days until, literally, he has cleared his deck. The — John McPhee

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. — John McPhee

Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life — John McPhee

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

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

He (Dave Brower) is an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason. — John McPhee

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. — John McPhee