PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
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 consc… - 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.
English
Collect this quote
About John McPhee
John Angus McPhee (born 8 March 1931) is an American writer and journalist, who is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
John Angus McPhee
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by 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.
Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
It has been Anita’s style as a geologist to begin with an outcrop and address herself to history from there — to begin with what she can touch, and then to reason her way back through time as far as she can go. A river conglomerate, as tangible rock, unarguably presents the river. The river speaks of higher ground. The volume of sediment that the river has carried can imply a range of mountains. To find Precambrian jaspers in the beds of younger rivers means that the Precambrian, the so-called basement rock, was lifted to form the mountains. These are sensible inferences drawn cleanly through an absence of alternatives. To go back in this way, retrospectively, from scene to shifting scene, is to go down the rock column, groping toward the beginning of the world. There is firm ground some of the way. Eventually, there comes a point where inference will shade into conjecture. In recesses even more remote, conjecture may usurp the original franchise of God.
Loading...