In Making War With Nature, There Was

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.

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.

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.

Taking Things From One Source Is Plagiarism; Taking Things From Several Sources Is Research.

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.