Quotes & Sayings About Limestone

Koh-i-noor in a limestone-quarry as an article of that character — Albert Jay Nock

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone. — Jack Horner

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. — Ann Zwinger

The apparent physical stability of reefs belies an underlying natural turmoil of growth, death and destruction of calcareous organisms. Much like a modern city, reefs are constantly being rebuilt and torn down at the same time. Corals are the bricks, broken pieces of plant and animal skeletons the sand, and algal crusts and chemical cements the mortar. Reef growth is determined by the production, accumulation, and cementation of all this calcareous stuff into solid limestone. — Jeremy Jackson

Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves- simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth Plantation or a wigwam. No way to keep out cold, or heat, for long. No way to preserve food, or to cook it. The things that define us, quiet as rock outcrops - the dumb screens and dials, the senseless clicks of on/off switches- without their purpose, they lose the measure of their beauty and we are left alone in the dark with countless useless things. — Jane Brox

And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city's uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and duck's bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs. — Hilary Mantel

Kentucky has always said you can't really make bourbon outside of Kentucky because it's a combination of the barrels and the limestone-fed springs that give us the water. That's our story, and we're sticking to it. — John Yarmuth

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

You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin - the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn't steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it's hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it's cold, the other way around. — Peter Zumthor

Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness." If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it. — Marc Ian Barasch

I am at a climbing area called the Wendenstock in Switzerland. This area has some of the best quality multi-pitch climbing I have seen on limestone. There is about a two-hour approach on one of the steepest grass slopes I have ever seen. The setting is amazing. — Tommy Caldwell

My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone? — Bruce Sterling

All the buildings lining rue de Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek. — Eloisa James

Peering, I heard the hooves come down the hill.
The posse passed, twelve horse; the leader's face
Was worn as limestone on an ancient sill. — Allen Tate

Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had learned to barter. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Think of England as a very large book. The Cotswolds would be an unfussy chapter in the middle somewhere where there is lots of limestone and even more sheep. — Susan Meissner

German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate. — Bernard Berenson

It wasn't permanent like the limestone cross that flagged the mountain peak in the horizon, so he made sure to write it down. After making the sign of the cross, a deep hunger pulled his weight to the bottom of La Loma. — Richard Yanez

Well, I don't like the word 'rock star,' the two words, 'rock star.' Not even 'soft rock star. Not even limestone star. I don't like those words. — Chris Martin

Desiree the child bride, and her sister Miranda, had gone grave-robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who'd been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery's most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule's, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom's jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk. — Timothy Schaffert

In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile.
A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they'd once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn't imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility. — Anne Michaels

Emily's world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can't think why or where she would run to. — Jude Morgan

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking. — Anna Quindlen

The logic behind using stone for the facing of the Empire State building seemed irrefutable, the choice of Bedford limestone inarguable. - architectural historian John Tauranac — Douglas Wissing

Abyssinias
"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: A huge four-footed limestone form
Sits in the desert, sinking in the sand.
Its whiskered face, though marred by wind and storm,
Still flaunts the dainty ears, the collar band
And feline traits the sculptor well portrayed:
The bearing of a born aristocrat,
The stubborn will no mortal can dissuade.
And on its base, in long-dead alphabets,
These words are set: "Reward for missing cat!
His name is Abyssinias, pet of pets;
I, Ozymandias, will a fortune pay
For his return. he heard me speak of vets
O foolish King! And so he ran away. — Henry N. Beard

Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan's advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul's history would remain forever unknown. — Charles C. Mann

Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation. — Khaled Hosseini

presentation, she looked drawn, as old as the limestone hills behind her property. Her facial skin was marbled, hair greying at the roots. She had grown frail, as though she might disintegrate at the first touch; she was a desiccated, vulnerable shadow of her former self and it was hard to — Carol Drinkwater

I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun. — Edward Abbey

Its somewhat austere and even forbidding limestone exterior, — Joyce Carol Oates

Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria's past. Parts of the city's past lay within time's reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries. — Patricia A. McKillip

Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see. — Anne Enright

Bitterness will make you sick. During [Madiba's] imprisonment they were forced to work in the limestone quarry. Chipping away for no reason. Bitterness is the same. You reduce your own character with such a mindless exercise of cultivating bitterness. — Zelda La Grange

Even those who saw only a part of the country witnessed so much that was new to them - the vast deltas, the astonishingly eroded limestone peaks, the sand-dune coastal forests, the forest mosaics and savannalike grassland. Many wrote home with vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna, the countless species they had never seen before. Many commented on the sheer luster of the place, of the seemingly infinite number of shades of green, in the rice paddies, the grasses, the palms, the rubber trees with their green oval leaves, the pine trees on faraway hills. — Fredrik Logevall

Guess what it is that turns plants to coal.
Pressure.
Guess what it is that turns limestone to marble.
Pressure.
Guess what it is that turns Briony's heart to stone.
Pressure.
Pressure is uncomfortable, but so are the gallows. Keep your secrets, wolfgirl. Dance your fists with Eldric's, snatch lightning from the gods. Howl at the moon, at the blood-red moon. Let your mouth be a cavern of stars. — Franny Billingsley

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust. — Henry David Thoreau

Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape. — W. H. Auden

We passed hieroglyphic scrolls, gold jewelry, sarcophagi, statues of pharaohs, and huge chunks of limestone. Why would someone display a rock? Aren't there enough of those in the world? — Rick Riordan

If time could run backward, like a film in reverse, we would see this mess reassemble itself into lush green hills and moss-covered ledges of limestone. The streams would run back up the hills to the springs and the salt would stay glittering in underground rooms. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation.
The little girl looks up. Puts the doll down. Smiles. — Khaled Hosseini

Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time. — Trevor Paglen

Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Promise"

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always. — Jane Hirshfield

Isn't it wonderful that two of the most sacred and symbolic plants, the olive and the vine, live on almost nothing, a terrace of limestone, sun and rain ... — Janet Erskine Stuart