Geomorphology Quotes

“Landscape, which looks so constant, is on the move. The mountains dream on the horizon, but mountains are just passing through. I watch them, wearing, grinding, rising up out there, their motion still the main beat.”
― Jill Frayne, Starting Out In the Afternoon: A Mid-Life Journey into Wild Land

“Rivers are the veins that carry life-giving water across the landscape.”
― T.J. Burr

“لقد بدأت أرى نهايتي..
بين طيات محدبة وأطياف قوس قزحي الألوان
ممتدة بعيدًا في الأفق
أتتبع أثار أسلاف من قروش ملائكة وأشجار متحجرة
بلورات لامعة هنا وهناك ،
متناثرة ..تحت ضوء شموس ساطعة وزمهرير ليال مقمرة
ضوء الأزهران يتبعني كنجمة
تتراقص على مسرح مهجور من جنس خبيث
حشد من سحالي وأفاعي وروابط عنق باهتة..
يا أيها العالي العلي
إمنحني سرك
اسرج مصابيح نفسي أكثر فأكثر .. واقترب.
#جيني_حسين_علي

I'm beginning to see my end...
Between convex folds and iridescent arc spectra.
Reaching far towards the horizon.
I follow traces of ancestors of nummulite and petrified trees.
Shining crystals here and there.
Scattered amid the light of dazzling suns and the thunder of moonlit nights.
The growing light pursues me as a star.
dancing on an abandoned stage from the malignant sex.
A crowd of lizards and snakes with faded ties.
Give me your secret.
O Most High...
Light my own lamps and get closer.
#Jenny_Hussien_Ali”
― Jenny Hussien Ali

“It intrigued me that literary people raved about the poems MacDiarmid wrote while living in Shetland, especially 'On a Raised Beach', while I found them hard to appreciate. As a Shetlander and a geographer who knew the place fairly intimately, including the steep storm beaches (and lack of post-glacial isostatic uplift necessary for raised beaches), I found his battering-ram approach to using geological terminology a bit indigestible. We all have moments of epiphany when we discover something profound, and I suppose that may have been the feeling he tried to convey but, along with what felt like garbled geomorphology, theology and - in my 'book' - the heinous crime of exoticising the Shaetlan tongue and its ancestry in the Norn language, it all felt a bit contrived, as if skiting the surface. But meanwhile, living and working in Edinburgh, I was learning to keep my mouth shut, and that any criticism of MacDiarmid's poetry was unthinkable. So I ungraciously joined the ranks of those who 'quite liked a few of his early lyrics' to get me off the hook.”
― Christine De Luca, Ayont the Thistle: A gallimaufry of poetry and prose to mark the centenary (1926 - 2026) of Hugh MacDiarmid's 'A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle'