#rocks

Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything - even mountains, rivers, plants and trees - should be your teacher. ↗

— Morihei Ueshiba

#also #between #books #even #everything

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. ↗

— John Updike

#dear #hearts #new #pleasing #rocks

Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld. ↗

— Henry Williamson

#birds #childhood #devon #everywhere #eyes

Possessed with a full confidence of the certain success which British valor must gain over such enemies, I have led you up these steep and dangerous rocks, only solicitous to show you the foe within your reach. ↗

— James Wolfe

#certain #confidence #dangerous #foe #full

The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#discovery #geology #memoir #rock-collecting #rocks

Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness - a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster - children into strength and athletic proportion. ↗

— William C. Bryant

#brethren #children #difficulty #foster #greatness

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#black #bulbs #clay #cover #death

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#abyss #between #brief #common #common sense

How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance. ↗

— Petrarch

#difficult #how #ignorance #reputation #rocks

Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#amongst #conclusions #convince #digging #doing