He Liked To Go From A To

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.

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.

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.

The Enthusiasm Geologists Show For Adding New Words To Their Conversation Is, If Anything, Exceeded By Their Affection For The Old. They Are Not About To Drop 'granite.' They Say 'granodiorite' When They Are In Church And 'granite' The Rest Of The Week.

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.