Volcanic Quotes & Sayings

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can't claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent. — Stefan Zweig

For underground metaphors, you can scrape an inch below the turf.
For what it's worth, my style's been developed in the core of the Earth.
The exhale's volcanic, the inhale is seismic ... — J-Live

Snowmageddon.
Dirty glacial clouds hammered the city's anvil. On the District of Columbia's northwestern edge, gusts of snow rolled across the Park Road Bridge like volcanic ash. — Simon Conway

It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem. — Boris Johnson

Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets. — Loren Eiseley

French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they're threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
— David Stanley

Teenagers are bored. By everything. Show a teenager an actual volcanic eruption, in progress, featuring giant billowing clouds of smoke, hot rocks raining from the sky, lava flows destroying entire villages, etc., and the teenager, eyebrows arched with sarcasm, will look at you and say, "Gee, this is swell," then return to the rental car, turn on his portable CD player, and listen to a band called Stomach Contents. — Dave Barry

Petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action lie. — Alexander Von Humboldt

To the untrained (human) eye, Thalassinia looks like an expanse of coral reefs and volcanic formations. There are no straight lines or geometric shapes to give away the fact that the structures are actually mermade. (Get it? Mermade. Like mermaid, but ... oh, never mind.) — Tera Lynn Childs

I love a mysterious underground and have exploited this in many of my books: the ice tunnels of Greenland, the volcanic tubes of Iceland, the mysterious passageways beneath an ancient African hillside or a Buddhist monastery in central China. And of course, London's famous tube system, setting for my book LONDON UNDERGROUND. It's a funny sort of fixation, especially given my mother's claustrophobia, which I saw her deal with on many occasions. We once lined up to take a tour into the Lascaux Caverns in France to see the ancient cave paintings. My mother didn't make it past the first quirky turn into the depths, and she sent me on by myself. Given her interest in history and archaeology, which she used as the basis for a series of mysteries she published and which inspired my own writing, it always surprised me she still loved to write about places she could never visit. — Chris Angus

This second type of vent is not volcanic, and there's no magma involved. Instead, it depends on the reaction of these freshly exposed rocks with seawater. Water doesn't just percolate into such rocks: it physically reacts with them; it is incorporated into them, altering their structure to form hydroxide minerals like serpentine (named after its resemblance to the mottled green scales of a serpent). The reaction with seawater expands the rock, causing it to crack and fracture, which in turn permits further seawater to penetrate, perpetuating the process. The scale of such reactions is astonishing. The volume of water bound into rock in this way is believed to equal the volume of the oceans themselves. As — Nick Lane

The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An — Neal Stephenson

What we want is another sample of life, which is not on our tree of life at all. All life that we've studied so far on Earth belongs to the same tree. We share genes with mushrooms and oak trees and fish and bacteria that live in volcanic vents and so on that it's all the same life descended from a common origin. What we want is a second tree of life. We want alien life, alien not necessarily in the sense of having come from space, but alien in the sense of belonging to a different tree altogether. That is what we're looking for, "life 2.0." — Paul Davies

Everyone says the Summer Queen is stunning,
beautiful, absolutely captivating. Yeah, I guess she is,
but so is a volcanic eruption — Julie Kagawa

The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, eel-vine skiver tussock. A single road leads from city down to jungle; the prisoner is merely locked out of the city. Escape is at his option; he may flee as far through the jungle as he sees fit: the entire continent is at his disposal. But no prisoner ever ventures far from the gate; and, when his presence is required, it is only necessary to unlock the gate and call his name. — Jack Vance

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanocon
may shorten life. — Toba Beta

I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other. — Charlotte Bronte

The geysers and hot springs of the Yellowstone are another proof of recent volcanic activity. — Ellsworth Huntington

Volcanic ash will be experienced in all parts of your world, as the volcanoes around your earth are simultaneously activated. Face masks and goggles will be of great value — Esther Hicks

They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was "embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians" (Barbier). It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some 50,000 people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour's brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled onto his head from the portico of his embassy; Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague's little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. "Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake? — Nancy Mitford

The sight of a fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes, had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. When she had vanished from his sight, he realized that a crisis had come in his life, and that neither silver speculations nor any other questions could ever be of such importance to him as this new and all-absorbing one. The love which had sprung up in his heart was not the sudden, changeable fancy of a boy, but rather the wild, fierce passion of a man of strong will and imperious temper. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden on horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two A. M. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of the moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they watched the sky relentlessly, translating sudden bursts of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past. — Leslie Marmon Silko

All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people. — Adolf Hitler

They were allowed a little touch at each of the books, but only with their fingertips tonight, literature cannot bear dirty hands; first we'll have to back each volume with paper, the covers must not get dirty, nor the spines slit, books are the nation's most precious possession, books have preserved the nation's life through monopoly, pestilence, and volcanic eruption, not to mention the tons of snow that have lain over the country's widely scattered homesteads for the major part of every one of its thousand years. — Halldor Laxness

Icy people often freeze themselves in order to hold in check a volcanic stew of disturbing and conflictual feelings. Emotional hibernation, if you will. Crack the ice and the stuff inside comes pouring out with all the discipline of molten lava. — Jonathan Kellerman

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland - a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth - can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth. — Slavoj Zizek

If the stillness is Volcanic
In the human face
When upon a pain Titanic
Features keep their place-
If at length the smoldering anguish
Will not overcome-
And the palpitating Vinyard
In the dust, be overthrown? — Emily Dickinson

The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games. — Tom Robbins

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile. — Nicolas Chamfort

For John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade. You know, it's like one of those deep diamond mined holes in South Africa, you know, they're about a mile underground. He'd have to come a mile up to get to even equilibrium, let alone have any contest in morality with Kevin Rudd. — Paul Keating

We're constantly re-evaluating the potential for life. We're finding it where we didn't think it could exist, such as volcanic vents and other extreme conditions like under arctic ice. We're finding life in these incredibly harsh and dynamic conditions, so we're having to re-evaluate our own ideas of what's possible on this planet alone. — Joe Rogan

Being omnipotent and perfectly evil it is intuitively appealing - irresistible, even - to the pedestrian observer to then suspect that The Owner of All Infernal Names occasionally shoves the earth's great rocky plates, unwraps a tsunami, whispers a tornado into existence, or angers a volcanic vent. Perhaps it is out of boredom and a need for entertainment, or a thirst that demands to be satisfied, calamities deliver evil in devastatingly muscular ways, and every terrestrial incentive exists to assume the Creator delivers disaster to satisfy His own perverted needs. — John Zande

I tried to describe impossible things like the scent of creosote - bitter, slightly resinous, but still pleasant - the high, keening sound of the cicadas in July, the feathery barrenness of the trees, the very size of the sky, extending white-blue from horizon to horizon, barely interrupted by the low mountains covered with purple volcanic rock. The hardest thing to explain was why it was so beautiful to me - to justify a beauty that didn't depend on the sparse, spiny vegetation that often looked half dead, a beauty that had more to do with the exposed shape of the land, with the shallow bowls of valleys between the craggy hills, and the way they held on to the sun. I found myself using my hands as I tried to describe it to him. — Stephenie Meyer

What do you believe, Aunt Elizabeth?'
'I believe ... I am comfortable with reading the Bible figuratively rather than literally. For instance, I think the six days in Genesis are not literal days, but different periods of creation, so that it took many thousands
or hundreds of thousands of years
to create. It does not demean God; it simply gives Him more time to build this extraordinary world.'
'And the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus?'
'They are creatures from long, long ago. They remind us that the world is changing. Of course it is. I can see it change when there are landslips at Lyme that alter the shoreline. It changes when there are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and floods. And why shouldn't it? — Tracy Chevalier

City halls are always huge and ornate and topped with ancient volcanic stone towers. — Joseph Fink

There was one of those sunsets beginning - the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution. — Nadine Gordimer

The old Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided - as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard ... Godfrey knew all this, and felt it with the greater force because he had constantly suffered annoyance from witnessing his father's sudden fits of unrelentingness, for which his own habitual irresolution deprived him of all sympathy. (He was not critical on the faulty indulgence which preceded these fits; that seemed to him natural enough.) — George Eliot

O Great Teller of the Future and Inhaler of Volcanic Gas!' said the king. 'Can I get a boy child over here, or what? — Rick Riordan

We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical. — Charles Darwin

I do not use airplanes. They strike me as unsporting. You can have an automobile accident-and survive. You can be on a sinking ship-and survive. You can be in an earthquake, fire, volcanic eruption, tornado, what you will-and survive. But if your plane crashes, you do not survive. And I say the heck with it. — Isaac Asimov

I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience? — W.G. Sebald

Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted. — Julian Baggini

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island? — Wyndham Lewis

Nature's accidents are the universe's way of throwing chance into a system which would die of too much orderliness. Hurricanes, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions are all Mother Nature's way of stirring up the pot to prevent stagnation and putrefaction.
A world without them would be a world of death. Floods, fires, eruptions, earthquakes all destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
So too riots, revolutions and wars are societies' ways of throwing chance into their systems, which are dying of too much orderliness. And like nature's eruptions, these too destroy and renew, kill and create, demolish and replant.
And so too with individuals. Human beings need in their lives earthquakes and floods and riots and revolutions, or we grow as rigid and unmoving as corpses. — Luke Rhinehart

I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me. — Elizabeth Gilbert

All these young mothers chauffeuring their volcanic three-year-olds through the grocery store. The child's name always sounds vaguely presidental, and he or she tends to act accordingly. "Mommy hears what you're saying about treats," the woman will say, "But right now she needs you to let go of her hair and put the chocolate-covered Life Savers back where they came from."
"No!" screams McKinley or Madison, Kennedy or Lincoln or beet-faced baby Reagan. Looking on, I always want to intervene. "Listen," I'd like to say, "I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won't stop its crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason. — David Sedaris

Do these fuels result always and necessarily in one way from the decomposition of a pre-existing organic substance? Is it thus with the hydrocarbons so frequently observed in volcanic eruptions and emanations, and to which M. Ch. Sainte-Claire Deville has called attention in recent years? Finally, must one assign a parralel origin to carbonaceous matter and to hydrocarbons contained in certain meteorites, and which appear to have an origin foreign to our planet? These are questions on which the opinion of many distinguished geologists does not as yet appear to be fixed. — Marcellin Berthelot

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind
or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean
except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down. — Julian Barnes

From then on, he was convinced that the universe dazzled mankind with volcanic eruptions, but had its own secret way of communicating with the select few, people like Andrew who looked at reality as though it were a strip of wallpaper covering up something else. — Felix J. Palma

I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched ... — Patrick O'Brian

She hadn't even known they were volcanic, but now they were lobbing big seminal gobbets of lava all over their lower slopes, like a drunk prom queen puking on her dress. Shit was getting geological, yo. — Lev Grossman

Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp. — Bill Mollison

Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn't care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants. — Alan Lightman

Straight out of Blackpool, I'm William Regal. My rhymes so intense, they shouldn't be legal. My style is refined, not crude and crass. I'll keep you grounded, like volcanic ash. I'll take you down, rung by rung. I'm just like British Parliment; I'm completely hung. Straight-up gangsta trippin'. Yes, boy! — William Regal

By death the moon was gathered in Long ago, ah long ago;
Yet still the silver corpse must spin
And with another's light must glow.
Her frozen mountains must forget
Their primal hot volcanic breath,
Doomed to revolve for ages yet,
Void amphitheatres of death.
And all about the cosmic sky,
The black that lies beyond our blue,
Dead stars innumerable lie,
And stars of red and angry hue
Not dead but doomed to die. — Julian Huxley

God is God of history and of nations. Also of nature. Originally Yahweh was probably a volcanic deity. But he periodically enters history, the best example being when he intervened to bring the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt and to the Promised Land.
They were shepherds and accustomed to freedom; it was terrible for them to be making bricks. And the Pharaoh had them gathering the straw as well and still being required to meet their quota of bricks per day. It is an archetypal timeless situation. God bringing men out of slavery and into freedom. Pharaoh represents all tyrants at all times. Her voice was calm and reasonable; Asher felt impressed. — Philip K. Dick

From this height the sleeping city seems like a child's construction, a model which has refused to be constrained by imagination. The volcanic plug might be black Plasticine, the castle balanced solidly atop it a skewed rendition of crenellated building bricks. The orange street lamps are crumpled toffee-wrappers glued to lollipop sticks. — Ian Rankin

NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility. — Pascal Mercier

I saw bubbling lava, and at the same moment I saw a reflection of a certain kind of inner turmoil. Because at the moment I looked into that crater, I slipped, and a large piece of volcanic rock took a hole out of my leg. The scar is still there 20, 30 years later. But it's one of those things that reminds you of the kind of risk or the kind of moment in order to push yourself. — Julie Taymor

Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity. — Henry Rollins

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species. — Elizabeth Kolbert

In fact, scientists have taken advantage of this effect by using the amount of red in contemporary paintings of sunsets to estimate the intensity of volcanic eruptions. Several Greek scientists, led by C. S. Zerefos, digitally measured the amount of red - relative to other primary colors - in more than 550 samples of landscape art by 181 artists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries to produce estimates of the amount of volcanic ash in the air at various times. Paintings from the years following the Tambora eruption used the most red paint; those after Krakatoa came a close second. — William K. Klingaman

Words have all died in the hollow of time, piling up soundlessly at the dark
bottom of a volcanic lake. — Haruki Murakami

We have become a force of nature Not long ago, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, forest fires, even earthquakes and volcanic explosions were accepted as "natural disasters or "acts of God." But now, we have joined God, powerful enough to influence these events. — David Suzuki

We need to reach the millions who live in cities, the hundreds of thousands in industrial centers, the tens of thousands in medium-sized towns, the thousands in small towns, and the hundreds in villages
all these at once. Like a volcanic eruption, a spiritual revolution needs to spread through the country, to spur people to crucial decisions. People have to recognize the futility of splitting life up into politics, economics, the humanities, and religion. We must be awakened to a life in which all of these things are completely integrated. — Eberhard Arnold

I point to the volcanic rock that forms the base of the forest floor, and say that if the trees can grow on such a hard, unforgiving surface, then a new life can be built on the foundation of any hardship. — Sarah Lotz

Everyone should be very grateful radioactivity exists at all. It can kill you, yes, but without it you wouldn't have been born in the first place. On Earth, deep under your feet, our planet happens to contain many atoms that do decay, all the time. Less so now than in the past, but still, Earth's mantle is radioactive. When atoms decay there, the particles they emit bump into their neighbours and generate heat, the very heat that contributes to keeping our planet warm. Without radioactivity, there would be no seismic or volcanic activity. The surface of the Earth would have been dead cold billions of yeras ago. Life as we know it would probably not exist at all. — Christophe Galfard

That was Big Fucking Mistake Number Two.
Ten minutes later, he heard Zoe coughing on the monitor and realized that he'd forgotten to keep her upright after he'd fed her. He ran into her room and scooped her up just in time for her to throw up all over both of them, a full-out, volcanic-style heaving that spewed out of her mouth and nose. Which was doubly disconcerting because, (A) holy shit, no one had ever warned him that something so tiny and cute could puke like a drunken frat boy who'd just gorged on a double-stuffed burrito, and (B) now Zoe was hollering like a banshee-Who left the dumbass in charge of me? Help!- — Julie James

Research suggests that the earliest flying reptiles swallowed small pieces of volcanic rock and could breathe out flammable gases like hydrogen produced in their own bodies. It is hypothesized that their ingenious "fire breath" was used as a defense against predatory reptiles. — Karen Shanor

The Fire Bug flared up at that. "You want to know what bugs me?" it said indignantly. "Nobodaddy's friendly about fire. Oh, it's fine in its place, people say, it makes a nice glow in a room, but keep an eye on it in case it gets out of control, and always put it out before you leave. Never mind how much it's needed; a few forests burned by wildfires, the occasional volcanic eruption, and there goes our reputation. Water, on the other hand! - hah! - there's no limit to the praise Water gets. Floods, rains, burst pipes, they make no difference. Water is everyone's favorite. And when they call it the Fountain of Life! - bah! - well, that just bugs me to bits." The Fire Bug dissolved briefly into a little cloud of angry, buzzing sparks, then came together again. "Fountain of Life, indeed," it hissed. "What an idea. Life is not a drip. Life is a flame. What do you imagine the sun is made of? Raindrops? I don't think so. Life is not wet, young man. Life burns. — Salman Rushdie

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. — Claire Messud

There must be a special, less volcanic portion of hell that was partitioned off and set aside for people who weren't all bad, just a little vindictive. They could call it the drama queen ward. It would be a huge hit. — Darynda Jones

The old world order changed when this war-storm broke. The old international order passed away as suddenly, as unexpectedly, and as completely as if it had been wiped out by a gigantic flood, by a great tempest, or by a volcanic eruption. The old world order died with the setting of that day's sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow. — Nicholas Murray Butler

She was known for her volcanic passion for Romantic music that erupted regularly during her lessons, then cooled and settled in between. — Tori De Clare

And as for the vague something
was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression?
that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare
to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature. — Charlotte Bronte

In lieu of descending to follow the Via Aurelia where it wound down a few miles off the coast, by Santa Maranella and Santa Severa and mediaeval Palo, and the volcanic soil and the steep ravines by Cervetri, where the long avenues of cliff-sepulchres are all that remain to show the site of Caere, and gaining so the mouth of Tiber to ascend the stream in any boat that he might find by Fiumicino, he still struck across the country by cattle-tracks known alone to himself and wild men like him, and chose to leave the Maccarese morasses untrodden in his rear, and had followed the course of the Arrone River as far as the high cliffs up by forsaken Galera. — Ouida

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. — Douglas Coupland

There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed. — Ella Dominguez

A map of the moon ... should be in every geological lecture room; for no where can we have a more complete or more magnificent illustration of volcanic operations. Our sublimest volcanoes would rank among the smaller lunar eminences; and our Etnas are but spitting furnaces. — James Dwight Dana

The interior of Mexico consists of a mass of volcanic rocks, thrust up to a great height above the sea-level. — Edward Burnett Tylor

Mic is volcanic, rhymes spread across the planet, I send out the scribe, now the vibes gigantic. — Louis Eric Barrier

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heel of small
war
until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime — Robert Lowell

They would emerge a short distance away, sometimes three or four of them, a short lived archipelago of volcanic islands. — Yann Martel

Nature has a way of deadening us to traumatic events, until we're ready to deal with it. And once you do, it's a volcanic reaction. — Patricia Montandon

I don't know a thing about cats.
I know everything else, life and its archipelago,
seas and unpredictable cities,
botany,
the pistil and its scandals,
the pluses and minuses of math.
I know the earth's volcanic funnels
and the crocodile's unreal shell,
the fireman's unseen kindness
and the priest's blue atavism.
cat leave
But a cat I can't figure out.
My mind slipped on its indifference.
Its eyes hold ciphers of gold. — Pablo Neruda

Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,
pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!) — H.D.

I've seen you up close, like this. I remember your eyes. They're the color of the sea -- just inside a coral reef and your freckles are like the stones of a volcanic island scattered along the sand. Your hair is like the sun setting over the water, shooting out orange rays in all directions — Melissa Turner Lee

Krakatoa, spelled "Krakatau" in Indonesian, is a volcano in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. It is also the name of an island group made up of what is left of a larger island, consisting of three volcanic peaks that were destroyed by the catastrophic 1883 eruption. This explosive force was equivalent to 100,000 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. It was the loudest sound ever heard in modern history and could be heard up to 3,000 miles away. At that time, the explosion caused huge tsunamis which killed more than 36,000 people and sent out shock waves that were recorded worldwide for almost a week. Years later in 1927, "Anak Krakatau" a new island mountain formed in its place and is again the location of volcanic activity. It is considered a part of the Pacific "Ring of Fire. — Hank Bracker

His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. — Neal Stephenson

Reyna set her dagger on the table. Percy had the vague feeling he'd seen her before. Her hair was black and glossy as volcanic rock, woven in a single braid down her back. She had the poise of a sword fighter - relaxed yet vigilant, as if ready to spring into action at any moment. The worry lines around her eyes made her look older than she probably was. "We have met, — Rick Riordan

Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. — Zadie Smith

We still carry this old caveman-imprint idea that we're small, nature's big, and it's everything we can manage to hang on and survive. When big geophysical events happen - a huge earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption - we're reminded of that. — James Balog

The sight of the fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes, had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. — Arthur Conan Doyle

And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight. — Anais Nin

Chopin was an invalid, as you know, but his music was volcanic. — Ignacy Jan Paderewski

More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn? — Richard Dawkins

Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions. — Hans Zinsser

You make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all
disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought,
history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions
and systems. Its always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out
of it? And what will you make? what are you looking for? There is no Truth.
There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral
action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and
contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,
stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend? — Blaise Cendrars

Oh that. Men do fall in love with me. They seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions; I'm sure I don't know why. All the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don't consider human volcanoes respectable. And I'm so tired of the subject. Our house is always full of women in love with my husband and men in love with me. We encourage it because it's pleasant to have company. — George Bernard Shaw