Earthquakes Quotes

“If you’re listening to this, congratulations! You survived Doomsday.
I’d like to apologize straightaway for any inconvenience the end of the world may have caused you. The earthquakes, rebellions, riots,tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, and of course the giant snake who swallowed the sun—I’m afraid most of that was our fault. Carter and I decided we should at least explain how it happened.”
― Rick Riordan, The Serpent's Shadow

“Our problems started in Dallas, when the fire-breathing sheep destroyed the King Tut exhibit.”
― Rick Riordan, The Serpent's Shadow

“Yes, an actual full-sized camel. If you find that confusing, just think how the criosphinx must have felt.
Where did the camel come from, you ask? I may have mentioned Walt’s collection of amulets. Two of them summoned disgusting camels. I’d
met them before, so I was less than excited when a ton of dromedary flesh flew across my line of sight, plowed into the sphinx, and collapsed on top
of it. The sphinx growled in outrage as it tried to free itself. The camel grunted and farted.
“Hindenburg,” I said. Only one camel could possibly fart that badly. “Walt, why in the world—?”
“Sorry!” he yelled. “Wrong amulet!”
The technique worked, at any rate. The camel wasn’t much of a fighter, but it was quite heavy and clumsy. The criosphinx snarled and clawed
at the floor, trying unsuccessfully to push the camel off; but Hindenburg just splayed his legs, made alarmed honking sounds, and let loose gas.
I moved to Walt’s side and tried to get my bearings.”
― Rick Riordan, The Serpent's Shadow

“The safest place to be during an earthquake would be in a stationary store.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“If for a moment you are inclined to regard these taluses as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, and run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of these magnificent rock piles -- a fine lesson; and all Nature's wildness tells the same story -- the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort -- each and all are the orderly beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.”
― John Muir

“Humans and nature can never be friends!
Nature will never hesitate to starve you in the drought, drown you in the rain, burn you in the sun, and kill you with an earthquake, a hurricane or a disease; and as such, nature should always be seen as an enemy not a friend.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Laughing like crazy
the child goes back to the city
gives birth to monsters
creates earthquakes
hairy women run naked
old folks who look like fetuses laugh and smoke.”
― Nicanor Parra, Emergency poems

“You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson [sic], proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a judgment had been coming, because the Christians had used alcohol and meat at Christmas or because ... well, yet again you can fill in the blanks for yourself. It was interesting, though, to notice that the Buddhists were often the worst. Contentedly patting an image of the chubby lord on her fencepost, a woman told the New York Times that those who were not similarly protected had been erased, while her house was still standing. There were enough such comments, almost identically phrased, to make it seem certain that the Buddhist authorities had been promulgating this consoling and insane and nasty view. That would not surprise me.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“On the way, I shared the backseat of Feyerabend's little sports car with the inflatable raft he kept there in case an 8-point earthquake came while he was on the Bay Bridge.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“Humanity and nature can never be friends! Nature will not hesitate to starve you in a drought, drown you in the rain, scorch you under the sun, or cause your demise through earthquakes, hurricanes, or diseases. Hence, nature should always be perceived as an adversary, not an ally.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky.
The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls.
A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.”
― Raymond Dean White, Impact

“The crust [of the earth] is very thin. Estimates of its thickness range from a minimum of about twenty to a maximum of about forty miles. The crust is made of comparatively rigid, crystalline rock, but it is fractured in many places, and does not have great strength. Immediately under the crust is a layer that is thought to be extremely weak, because it is, presumably, too hot to crystallize. Moreover, it is thought that pressure at that depth renders the rock extremely plastic, so that it will yield easily to pressures. The rock at that depth is supposed to have high viscosity; that is, it is fluid but very stiff, as tar may be. It is known that a viscous material will yield easily to a comparatively slight pressure exerted over a long period of time, even though it may act as a solid when subjected to a sudden pressure, such as an earthquake wave. If a gentle push is exerted horizontally on the earth's crust, to shove it in a given direction, and if the push is maintained steadily for a long time, it is highly probable that the crust willl be displaced over this plastic and viscous lower layer. The crust, in this case, will move as a single unit, the whole crust at the same time. This idea has nothing whatever to do with the much discussed theory of drifting continents, according to which the continents drifted separately, in different directions.
[...]
Let us visualize briefly the consequences of a displacement of the whole crustal shell of the earth. First, there will be the changes in latitude. Places on the earth's surface will change their distances from the equator. Some will be shifted nearer the equator, and others farther away. Points on opposite sides of the earth will move in opposite directions. For example, if New York should be moved 2,000 miles south, the Indian Ocean, diametrically opposite, would have to be shifted 2,000 miles north. [...] Naturally, climatic changes will be more or less proportionate to changes in latitude, and, because areas on opposite sides of the globe will be moving in opposite directions, some areas will be getting colder while others get hotter; some will be undergoing radical changes of climate, some mild changes of climate, and some no changes at all.
Along with the climatic changes, there will be many other consequences of a displacement of the crust. Because of the slight flattening of the earth, there will be stretching and compressional effects to crack and fold the crust, possibly contributing to the formation of mountain ranges. there will be changes in sea level, and many other consequences.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key To Some Basic Problems Of Earth Science

“I noticed that volcanoes, earthquakes and floods, though are not good events, they are better than the silence of good people when bad people take the podium. The latter are to an extent uncontrollable, but the former can be stopped.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts

“The quake experience stays in our hearts, ready to strike again with greater force. Memory looms with the potential to return.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet breakups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up 'mountain-topping superwaves' in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Other than Oppenheimer's own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the effects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms -- floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions -- all occurring at the same time.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“A little "Gratitude" Can Occur a "LoveQuake" Magnitude Scale Enough to Shake You and Get You to a Peaceful Latitude and Longitude of Your Being." ~ Syed Sharukh”
― Syed Sharukh

“A small, 4.8 quake, it was unlikely many other people in my town felt it. But alone in the house, I had shaken alongside the breaking earth, 1920s carnival glass looking on.”
― Tania Runyan, Making Peace With Paradise: an autobiography of a California girl

“I was shocked at how many earthquakes there are on the island of Hawaii!”
― Steven Magee

“The town of Pahala in Hawaii may be on its way to being a fond memory of the past, as it is where the many earthquakes are centered!”
― Steven Magee

“Years of many earthquakes preceded the eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano.”
― Steven Magee

“In the months before Mauna Loa erupted in 2022, my home was vibrating weekly and noticeably shaking about once per month from the earthquakes in Pahala on Hawaii island.”
― Steven Magee

“They don’t mention earthquakes in that one Mamas & Papas song and it’s a bummer cuz it’s the best part about living in california.”
― Paris Jackson

“If people do not die when measures are taken against a natural disaster, the name of natural disaster deaths when measures are not taken is nothing but murder!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“When will humanity, which has experienced countless natural disasters, realize that the universe we live in is a formidable battlefield? The universe is the most interesting friend of every living creature, because it is both our greatest friend and our worst enemy! The greatest weapon against the enmity of the universe is science. The technical shields that science offers us are the most effective weapons we can use against storms, earthquakes, fires and cosmic disasters!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The Rushmore faces will fall before the onslaught from below.”
― Anthony T. Hincks