Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.
What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?
For thousands of years, father and son have stretched wistful hands across the canyon of time.
I didn't go to Harvard or Princeton, but I can count - the defunding box canyon is a tactic that will fail and weaken our position.
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.
All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.
God must be a smell, one of those delicious dreamy aromas that float into the soul on the warm hopeful days of spring. What is God must be one of those smells that beguile and inebriate the mind, who like a fine drunken horse of water the heart now rides, galloping wild in every direction like a river flooding right through the topsoil of your youth, cutting and eroding a groove that will be your life, a canyon sunk deep into the virgin plains and unsawn forests of your early days.
Men need to know the elemental challenges that sea and mountains present. They need to know what it is to be alive and to survive when great storms come. They need to unlock the secrets of streams, lakes, and canyons and to find how these treasures are veritable storehouses of inspiration. They must experience the sense of mastery of adversity. They must find a peak or a ridge that they can reach under their own power alone.
What they [Jim deMint and the oil lobby] do care about is the precedent. If they open up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), they'll think they can do anything to the environment - anything at all. Drilling in Yosemite? In the Grand Canyon? What's next?
So what will define greatness for your generation? I believe it is to use the knowledge that you have earned here to find ways, not only to connect to computers, but to connect to people; not only to bridge gaps in science, but to bridge gaps between cultures; not only to use numbers and formulas to create, but to use words to lead, and in the process, to close that canyon between ignorance and understanding.
At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun.
Myths that need clarification: "No matter how many times you see the Grand canyon, you are still emotionally moved to tears." False. It depends on how many children the out-of-towners brought with them who kicked the back of your seat from Phoenix to Flagstaff and got their gum caught in your hair.
A rill in a barnyard and the Grand Canyon represent, in the main, stages of valley erosion that began some millions of years apart.
There is a place where time stands still ...illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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 who fought for this...
Well, once you've been in the Canyon and once you've sort of fallen in love with it, it never ends...it's always been a fascinating place to me, in fact I've often said that if I ever had a mistress it would be the Grand Canyon.
All right, cupcakes. You are about to see the Grand Canyon. Try not to break it. The skywalk can hold the weight of seventy jumbo jets, to you featherweights should be safe out there. If possible, try to avoid pushing each other over the edge, as that would cause me extra paperwork.
As a ballplayer, (Dizzy) Dean was a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef. Nobody ever taught him baseball and he never had to learn. He was just doing what came naturally when a scout named Don Curtis discovered him on a Texas sandlot and gave him his first contract.
Today the thing I find myself thinking about the most is our landscape...I think it's something a lot of us take for granted; for many of us Australia is just there but how many of us have really seen it, have seen Kakadu or Kings Canyon? I know I hope to at some stage, to see Uluru at sunset and the ancient art in the Abrakurrie caves. I think it's our landscape which defines our identity and it's what I'm most grateful for.
I had so much fun touring the Grand Canyon area with the Sierra Club. I love to get outdoors and enjoy nature. We went kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, and even rode mules. To do all these things in one of the most stunning natural areas in the world just made it more amazing. I don't believe that anyone can see the Grand Canyon area for themselves and not know that we have to do everything we can to protect it for future generations.
The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.
Working with Jack [Nicholson] is sort of like standing in front of the Grand Canyon.
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
Trying to fill the God-sized hole in our hearts with things other than God is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles.
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