John McPhee Quotes

In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.

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

I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.

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

Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness

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

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

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

Mother like son' is a saying so true, the world will judge largely of mother by you.

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

There are dark, hard, cherty silt-stones from some deep ocean trench full of rapidly accumulating Pennsylvanian guck.

the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved. In

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, bad. And that's how I found out - by doing it.