Tectonic Quotes & Sayings

there are between life partners sliding layers of history, tectonic plates of it shifting over the decades together. — Helen Simpson

At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against his parents. His right hand was Evil Dad, and his left was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit. Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom's cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemmoroids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered. — Margaret Atwood

According to all the experts, it's time for me to talk about what I'm going through ... I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark. — Jandy Nelson

The 2008 election settled nothing, not even for a while. Our national politics are reflecting what appears to be going on geologically, on the bottom of the oceans and beneath the crust of the Earth: the tectonic plates are moving. — Peggy Noonan

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten. — Joan Didion

And it sounds like two tectonic plates are getting it on somewhere beneath us — Daniel Jose Older

But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts.
The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole — Anderson Cooper

The volumes, the surfaces, the lines-in one word, the structures that build a tectonic construction-do not represent the whole picture: there is also the movement that animated and still animates these bodies because the history continues and we live under no particular privileged conditions at any given time in this great process. — Emile Argand

The moon is the better storyteller for this event. Our ancient craters are smoothed over by erosion and tectonic motion. With no erosion, no wind, and no liquid water on the moon, craters can remain perfectly visible for billions of years, an orbiting catalog of impacts. — Craig Childs

If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates. — Seth Shostak

When I putt, my emotions collide like tectonic plates. It's left my memory circuits full of scars that won't heal. — Mac O'Grady

Every encounter with the external world presents a conflict with a person's cherished inner world. How we resolve these ongoing boarder conflicts between reality and ideas results in tectonic shifts in our mental makeup, which influx we incorporate by responding to the never-ending chaos of a worldly life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

As life speeds up & the political becomes ever more personal democracy continues to foster change as fast as the movement of tectonic plates — Dean Cavanagh

Many scales of climate change are in fact natural, from the slow tectonic scale, to the fast changes embedded within glacial and interglacial times, to the even more dramatic changes that characterize a switch from glacial to interglacial. So why worry about global warming, which is just one more scale of climate change? The problem is that global warming is essentially off the scale of normal in two ways: the rate at which this climate change is taking place, and how different the "new" climate is compared to what came before. — Anthony D. Barnosky

My life is never stable. It' as if I balance on a series of tectonic plates like the ones under the Pacific Ring of Fire. — Mary Jennifer Payne

This is women's moment to shift the tectonic plates of power on both the personal life and the leadership levels. — Gloria Feldt

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference ... the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure) ... but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality ... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control ... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish — Rebecca Solnit

A tectonic plate's got to do what a tectonic plate's got to do. — N. T. Wright

Three dominant hypotheses explain what drives plate tectonic motion. Each one relies on the convention of the mantle - the movement of heated rock materials beneath earth's crust - but each one focuses on a different piece of the cycle: Mantle convection hypothesis: This hypothesis proposes that heated materials inside the earth move up and down in a circular motion (like the wax in a lava lamp) and the continental plates resting on this mat-erial are moved in the direction of the circular motion. Ridge-push hypothesis: This hypothesis states that the creation of new rock materials along mid-ocean ridges continually pushes oceanic crustal plates upward and outward, so that the far edges are forced into collisions with other plates. Slab-pull hypothesis: This hypothesis is the opposite of the ridge-push model. It proposes that the heavy, dense outer edges of crustal plates sink into the mantle at plate boundaries and pull the rest of the plate along with them. — Alecia M. Spooner

How much
Does your tongue have to bleed
Before you stop biting it?

Your heart is not a lion,
So why are you taming it?

God gave you a loud voice,
A voice box dripping revolution,
So quit trying to lower your volume.

You were meant
To rattle the tectonic plates
Of anyone who has ever told you
That you're not enough.

You were born fiery
Don't let anyone put out your flame
With their tears of incompetence. — Zienab Hamdan

Connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward. No life without tectonic activity, without volcanic activity. And we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium. — Garik Israelian

The two of you stood there, side by side, and the tectonic plates of your lives began to shift and resettle, continents separating. — Dan Chaon

Diamonds are held under tons and tons of pressure, extremely high temperatures of fire and shuffled under shifting of tectonic plates, for a long, long time! Yet when they come out from there and are put on display for their beauty; does anybody stop to evaluate the diamond based upon all the shit it's been through and say "Remember that disgusting hole it used to be in? I bet it was hell in there!" No, people don't remember where a diamond has come from; they just see the beauty of it now. But it wouldn't have become so beautiful, you know, if not for all of that! So why should we look at other people, or at ourselves and evaluate them/ourselves based upon their/our pasts? Shouldn't we forget that? And only see the beauty that is in front of our eyes? Whatever it was, it made you beautiful! And that is what matters! — C. JoyBell C.

The matches are highly ritualized: Chinese players all scream the same way after hitting a big point: "Choooo." Players from everywhere approach the table after a rally and wipe their sweaty palms on the front corner of the surface beside the net, locking eyes. In a best-of-five or best-of-seven match, with games to 11, just a few points can change everything. Small swings of momentum become massive tectonic shifts. — Anonymous

It's all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation ... is easy, is quick. There's also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they're there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don't join the dots. ... Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that's a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus. — Martin Amis

Like the tectonic plate it sits upon, Hollywood is subject to seismic jolts and constant tremors. Each season erupts with a new champion, and every so often a genuine earthquake will tear down the apparently secure infrastructure. — Lynda Obst

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear. — Bernhard Schlink

all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimensional law, civil, religious, or military. I'm also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario--that's a nasty one--tectonic inversion-- — Joseph R. Lallo

Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were. — Thomas Beller

Why did the earthquake and tsunami occur in Japan? Was it the act of an angry God? No, it was the result of the movement and collision of the earth's tectonic plates - a process driven by the earth's need to regulate its own internal temperature. Without the process that creates earthquake, our planet could not sustain life. — Adam Hamilton

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges. — Umair Haque

You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity. — Christopher Hitchens

Some days you wake up changed. This was one for Starling, she could tell. What she had seen yesterday at the Potter Funeral Home had caused in her a small tectonic shift. Starling had studied psychology and criminology in a good school. In her life she had seen some of the hideously offhand ways in which the world breaks things. But she hadn't really known, and now she knew: sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table at Potter, West Virginia, in the room with the cabbage roses. Starling's first apprehension of that mind was worse than anything she could see on the autopsy scales. The knowledge would lie against her skin forever, — Thomas Harris

You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside. — Mary Karr

If something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. — Bernhard Schlink

The tectonic, technology-driven shifts that characterize the Internet Century have rendered some of the commonly accepted strategic fundamentals we learned in school and on the job incorrect.56 — Eric Schmidt

Funny how I always thought the world would dilate and then snap back with a loud bang the day a boy happened to me. But there was no explosion, no fireworks, no sudden shift in the tectonic plates of the earth. It was more of a Zen moment - Quiet. Everything was instantly quiet. The world, my mind, the flux of time - all still. And in the middle of it was him. — Ramona Wray

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument
that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'
makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading. — Michael Ignatieff

When and if Violet ever fell in love, lightning would split the heavens, tectonic plates would shift, continents would reorder themselves.
Because she might be willful and spoiled and impetuous, but no one loved with the force of his sister. Her love story would be epic. — Julie Anne Long