Basin and Range

"'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.'"

pg. 135


"'...It is a wondrous thing to have the random facts in one's head suddenly fall into the slots of an orderly framework. It is like an explosion inside. That is what happened to me and to others as I was working out (and talking out) the geometry of the western U.S. . . . The best part of the plate business is that it has made us all start communicating. People who squeeze rocks and people who identify deep-ocean nannofossils and people who map faults in Montana suddenly all care about each other's work. I think I spend half my time just talking and listening to people from many fields, searching together for how it might all fit together. And when something does fall into place, there is that mental explosion and the wondrous excitement. I think the human brain must love order.'"

pg 215-215

Basin and Range 
by. John Mcphee
1981 Farrar, Straus and Giroux