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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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