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

- John Mcphee

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 wa…

- John Mcphee

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.

- John Mcphee

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 onl…

- John Mcphee

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

- John Mcphee

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 …

- John Mcphee

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. An…

- John Mcphee

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

- John Mcphee

On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time. ... Geologists ... see the un…

- John Mcphee