Top John McPhee Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

John McPhee Biography

John Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931) is an American writer, widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008 he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career."

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John McPhee Quotes

With their four-dimensional minds, and in their interdisciplinary ultra verbal way, geologists can wiggle out of almost anything.

Four, Mind, Minds, Verbal, Way, Wiggle

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

Forever, Like, Reaction, Time, Way, Years

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.

Blanked, Limestone, Marine, Moving, Ocean, Writing

He (Dave Brower) is an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason.

Age, Brower, Dave, Emotionalist, Reason

I can't stand a sentence until it sounds right.

Writing, Sound, Sentences, Sentence, Right, Sounds

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.

Everest, Fiat, Marine, Motivational, Writing

Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning.

Morning, Nonfiction, Hell, Having

Taking things from one source is plagiarism; taking things from several sources is research.

Plagiarism, Research, Several, Source

On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

Key, Keys, Long, Six, Three, Water

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.

Distinct, Horse, Large, Numbers, Parts, Thinking

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.

Alphabet, Book, Formed, Learn, Rocks, Vocabulary

The doctor listens in with a stethoscope and hears sounds of a warpath Indian drum.

Doctors, Sound, Stethoscope, Warpath, Drum, Sounds

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

Loss, Making, Risk, War, Winning

He liked to go from A to B without inventing letters between.

Action, Inventing, Letters, Liked

Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life

Life, Order, Suspension, Writing