Best 43 quotes in «grand canyon quotes» category

If you are working, almost like with layers of the Grand Canyon, there's history within those layers.

I could throw 56-pound words clear across the Grand Canyon. As a matter of course, I went into politics.

I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.

Majestic doesn't appeal to us. We [Americans] like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.

In golf, 'close' is like the north and south rim of the Grand Canyon.

The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said no.

We didn't have a generation gap, we had a generation Grand Canyon.

Armies of marching men told of that blight of nations old or young—war. These, and birds unnamable, and beasts unclassable, with dots and marks and hieroglyphics, recorded the history of a bygone people. Symbols they were of an era that had gone into the dim past, leaving only these marks, {Symbols recording the history of a bygone people.} forever unintelligible; yet while they stood, century after century, ineffaceable, reminders of the glory, the mystery, the sadness of life.

Working with Jack [Nicholson] is sort of like standing in front of the Grand Canyon.

Beautiful doesn't begin to describe it. A flower is beautiful. But this is beautiful the way that a person is beautiful- terrifying with its jagged edges, yet seductive with its crevices that hide so many secrets.

A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts.

Eating Fruit at the Grand Canyon- A song to make death easy Since this great hole in earth is beyond My comprehension and I am hungry, I sit on the rim and eat fruit The colors of the stone i see, Strawberries of iron cliffs, sagebrush melons, white sand apple, grapes The barely purple of the stonewashed slopes, And every color I eat is in my vision, Colonized by my eye, by me and everyone I have known, so vast, so remote, That we can only gaze at ourselves, wondering At our reaches, eat fat fruit while we Grow calm if we can, our folded Rocky interiors pressed upwards through Our throats, side canyons seeming almost Accessible, the grand river of blood Carving us even as we sit, devouring Color that will blush on our skin Nourish us so that we may climb The walls of the interior, bewildered, Tremulous, but observant as we move Down in, one foot, another, careful not to fall, to fall, The fruit fueling us in subtle Surges of color in this vastly deep Where birds make shadow and echo And we have no idea Why we cannot comprehend ourselves, Each other, a place so deep and bright It has no needs and we wonder What we’re doing here on this fragment Of galactic dust, spinning, cradled, Awestruck, momentarily alive.

Grand Canyon/West Human stories roll across the Landscape, demanding attention, voicing Their energy, responding to my questions; The land only vibrates in the wind. Or not. Rocks and lava, caught in the moment Of fall, of flow, expose fractured Innards and cooled heat, vibrate only rarely. These human voices and the tales they tell Deflect with looks,their gestures, Their act of giving me what it can feel Myself, or at least understand. I can’t Put myself in the pinyon’s place, trembling At the edge, growing at the upper end of a Human sized bowl, the lower end a slot i peer Through to see the river’s ribbon, its white flecked Trail through the deepest cleft of all. I can’t know The pinyon’s mind , though I try.

I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick intimate pounding of the heart. The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first.

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

Flash after flash across the horizon: Tourists trying to take the Grand Canyon By night. They don’t know Every last shot will turn out black. It takes Rothko sixty years to arrive At the rim of his canyon. He goes there only after dark. As he stands at the railing, his pupils open Like a camera shutter at the slowest speed. He has to be patient. He has to lean Far over the railing To see the color as of darkness: Purple, numb brown, mud-red, mauve -an abyss of bruises. At first, you’d think it was black on black Something you son’t want to look at, he says As he waits, The colors vibrate in the chasm Like voices: You there with the eyes, Bring back something from The brink of nothing to make us see.

He meant the Grand Canyon was only a mood of nature, a bold promise, a beautiful record. He meant that mountains had sifted away in its dust, yet the canyon was young. Man was nothing, so let him be humble. This cataclysm of the earth, this playground of a river was not inscrutable; it was only inevitable—as inevitable as nature herself. Millions of years in the bygone ages it had lain serene under a half moon; it would bask silent under a rayless sun, in the onward edge of time. It taught simplicity, serenity, peace. The eye that saw only the strife, the war, the decay, the ruin, or only the glory and the tragedy, saw not all the truth. It spoke simply, though its words were grand: "My spirit is the Spirit of Time, of Eternity, of God. Man is little, vain, vaunting. Listen. To-morrow he shall be gone. Peace! Peace!

I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.

I love my country, by which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout its history, who have fought the government to make right. Where so many cunning sons and daughters, our foremothers and forefathers came singing through slaughter, came through hell and high water so that we could stand here, and behold breathlessly the sight; how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light. Why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those that fought for this?

I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I’d like to be. I guess I’d like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

if there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim-that is the paramount goal.

It is a spectacular illusion – a deeply three-dimensional scene flattened onto an earthly canvas.

I would rather stumble by chance on a tiny stream in the woods than plan a trip to the Grand Canyon.

It seemed so improbable. But so did everything else that I really paid attention to.

Martha told me, "I don't know how you're going to talk about romance in your book, but you're going to have to because its truly part of all our lives down there-and in a big way- because its an incredibly sensuous environment. Think of how many times you've fallen in love down there, and how many times people have fallen in love with you. Its a place where we shine. We're the happiest in our lives. We're vibrant. We're just so full of life, and not only does that put you in the mood for love, it sets you up for it. People are really drawn to people who are shining, who feel so happy where they are and who they are and what they're doing and who they're doing it with.

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…

Mortals: meet the empty air, arias carved out of rocks beyond our puny clock philosophy.

People have been driving off of the canyon for decades. I don't know of any that were accidental. One Ranger who worked here before I did told me that on several occasions, when cars drove off and folks died, they went down and collected the remains. But there were no helicopters strong enough and affordable enough to haul the cars out. He told me Rangers went down later and sprayed the cars with paint to help them blend in with the rocks.

Powell was first of all a scientist with a deep curiosity about nature, and this curiosity motivated his explorations. Because Powell viewed the landscape and waterscape as a scientist, he realized that the arid West couldn't fit into America's Manifest Destiny dreams, and thus he became a pioneering conservationist.

Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Sunrise, Grand Canyon We stand on the edge, the fall Into depth, the ascent Of light revelatory, the canyon walls moving Up out of Shadow, lit Colors of the layers cutting Down through darkness, sunrise as it Passes a Precipitate of the river, its burnt tangerine Flare brief, jagged Bleeding above the far rim for a split Second I have imagined You here with me, watching day’s onslaught Standing in your bones-they seem Implied in the record almost By chance- fossil remains held In abundance in the walls, exposed By freeze and thaw, beautiful like a theory stating Who we are is Carried forward by the x Chromosome down the matrilineal line Recessive and riverine, you like Me aberrant and bittersweet... Riding the high Colorado Plateau as the opposing Continental plates force it over A mile upward without buckling, smooth Tensed, muscular fundament, your bones Yet to be wrapped around mine- This will come later, when I return To your place and time... The geologic cross section Of the canyon Dropping From where I stand, hundreds millions of shades of terra cotta, of copper Manganese and rust, the many varieties of stone- Silt, sand, and slate, even “green River rock...”my body voicing its immense Genetic imperatives, human geology falling away Into a Depth i am still unprepared for The canyon cutting down to The great unconformity, a layer So named by the lack Of any fossil evidence to hypothesize About and date such A remote time by, at last no possible Retrospective certainties... John Barton

Some word - from before this translation

Rim are there horizons where there is no horizontal where mountains fold space, hold distance up? embedded in a canyon our heads tilt instinctively. here earth meets sky, we can reach it; the rim does not shimmer and recede. we lean into diagonal lives, relieved of right angles eyes, arms, hearts drawn upward, vectored to ridgelines keenly aware of the slant of time, its shape and substance; it is a wedge; it moves along ray-stroked slopes; we pass into it, are passed over.

There will never be a photograph of the Grand Canyon that can adequately describe its depth, breadth, and true beauty.

This World "We hear that other lands are better: we do not know. The pines sing and we are glad. Our children play in the sand and we hear them sing and we are glad. The seeds ripen an we have them to eat and we are glad. We do not want their good lands; we want our rocks and the great mountains where our fathers lived." A Shi’vwits chief to JW Powell Sun on red rock Raves riding thermals Jays crazy in the pines Big blue mountain On the far horizon And here- infinite air- Moving, opening East-west, north-south, Up-down, high Over the one-way river Pulling The whole sky west. What need For any other world?

This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn.

Thomas Moran Paints This place gets inside you with its soft reds And tans. You can feel the lithe sweep of brushes Inside your head. Your empty hands moving From side to side involuntarily. It is like seeing An angel’s brilliancy for the first time and trying To describe it to your own soul in a language Of the eye your heart can understand The light is always different here getting darker Near the river paler near the rim. But it is The way the canyon breathes warm air rising Cool air settling that makes the colors vibrant Gives them luster. I can pile and scrape paint On a canvas forever and miss the one rare Note that hides in the throat of a canyon wren But I can dream that bird within me and capture It on silk where its song will bring this magical Secret landscape into my art on its wings.

Unkar Delta at Mile 73 The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke’s description of “raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet.” Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified.

All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

When visiting the Grand Canyon, make sure you hike into the canyon. And be careful not to fall or step in mule poop.