Quotes by John McPhee

“If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.”

“I'm addicted to the entire planet. I don't want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, look...”

“When D's cabin caught fire, D was out of the country. Half the town-Christians and drinkers alike-came out to fight the fire and loot the cabin. There were individual piles of loot, and fights over...”

“The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but ...”

“A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now...”

“If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut...”

“He said, Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. Its not, if youre mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater.”

“going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set asideto say, This is the way it was. ”

“Some miners wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ni...”

“Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.”

“Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before ...”

“If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to ...”

“A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet ...”

“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...”

“Behind every tennis player there is another tennis player.”

“He said, “Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It’s not, if you’re mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater.”

“Some miners’ wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while n...”