Taking Things From One Source

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.

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.

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.

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 Unbelievable Swiftness With Which One Evolving Species On The Earth Has Learned To Reach Into The Dirt Of Some Tropical Island And Fling 747s Across The Sky ... Seeing A Race Unaware Of Its Own Instantaneousness In Time, They Can Reel Off All The Species That Have Come And Gone, With Emphasis On Those That Have Specialized Themselves To Death.

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.