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“Stars in the sky will always glitter if we are not blinded by the erosion of our emotions, or hampered by our lack of interest and awareness. ("Living life as a poem")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“i am
afraid
that if i
open
myself i will not
stop pouring. (why do i fear
becoming a river. what mountain
gave me such shame.)”
― Jamie Oliveira

“A wise person is like a smoothly polished rock: it takes time to become either.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“We are often unaware of the gradual decline and the erosion in our lives but not unaware of the gnawing feeling it brings.”
― Eric Samuel Timm, Static Jedi: The Art of Hearing God Through the Noise

“I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.”
― Rick Yancey

“The water and the wind will wear the wood down, until only water and wind remain.”
― Lisa Mantchev, Perchance to Dream

“Push up some mountains. Cut them down. Drown the land under the sea. Push up some more mountains. Cut them down. Push up a third set of mountains, and let the river cut through them. “Unconformityâ€� is the geologic term for an old, eroded land surface buried under younger rock layers. Put your outspread hand over the Carlin Canyon, Nevada unconformity and your fingers span roughly forty million years- the time that it took to bevel down the first set of mountains and deposit the younger layers on top.

What is forty million years? Enough time for a small predatory dinosaur to evolve into a bird. Enough time for a four-legged, deer-like mammal to evolve into a whale. And far more than enough time to turn an ape-like creature in eastern Africa into a big-brained biped who can marvel at such things.

The Grand Canyon’s Great Unconformity divides 1.7 billion-year-old rock from 550 million-year-old rock, a gap of more than one billion years. One billion years. I earn my salary studying the Earth and teaching its history, but I admit utter helplessness in comprehending such a span.

A billion pages like those of this book would stack up more than forty miles. I had lived one bullion seconds a few days before my thirty-second birthday. A tape measure one billion inches long would stretch two-thirds of the way around the Earth. Such analogies hint at what deep time means- but they don’t get us there. “The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time," John McPhee once observed, “it may only be able to measure it.”
― Keith Meldahl

“For a second, I thought about the lifetime of that sand. I envisioned it from its rocky beginnings as a boulder somewhere far away and long ago, to its breakdown in cobbles, to its further breakdown into pebbles, then to its further breakdown into coarse sand, then to its further break”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“You don't notice erosion when it's happening.”
― Quiara Alegría Hudes, My Broken Language

“One good thing about the rain is that it is not only destructive, in that it can bring dead plants back to life.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“In the small hours of a cold February dawn, Justin and I walked to the Pacific, high cliffs eroding over the ocean, crashed and crashed by lapping salty waves. Their spray misted us in day’s young purple air, exhilarating. Walking the Golden Gate Bridge, our world receding, pale gold sunrise lit thin fog, morning coloring us like a faded fairy tale.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Erosion of corruption is ambition of a nation. Sow the revolution or go for contribution; if not, opt corroboration.”
― Vikrmn, You By You

“I was particularly impressed by the varying degrees of weathering and erosion seen on the different moai, which could be telltale signs of major discrepancies in their ages. The levels of sedimentation around certain moai also impressed me. Some moai have been buried in up to an estimated six meters of sediment, or more, such that even though they are standing erect, only their chins and heads are above the current ground level. Such high levels of sedimentation could occur quickly, for instance if there were catastrophic landslides, mudflows, or possibly tsunamis washing over the island, but I could not find any such evidence (and landslides or tsunamis would tend to shift and knock over the tall statues). Rather, to my eye, the sedimentation around certain moai suggests a much more extreme antiquity than most conventional archaeologists and historians believe to be the case--or believe to be possible.”
― Robert M. Schoch, Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future

“No machines have been found in the archaeological record to support these assertions, but there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence that leads to such conclusions. Are the machines still intact and lying under the desert sand? Or were they removed completely from the areas? Or could it be that all this evidence points to an earlier civilization that suffered a cataclysm of such magnitude that much of what existed was destroyed, and what remained was susceptible to erosion, decay, and corrosion, and slowly disappeared over a long period of time? This brings us back to Robert Schoch's evaluation of the erosion pattern on the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure. He claimed that the period of time when sufficient rain fell in Egypt to cause this erosion was seven to nine thousand years ago. Is this sufficient time for ancient machines to turn to dust and blow away? It seems incredible to imagine, but there is reason to suspect that this could have happened.
[...]
If we follow the idea of an older civilization, therefore, the pyramids would have already been there before the first dynasty of the ancient Egyptians. The Great Pyramid was, most likely, the zenith of construction on the plateau, and the other pyramids were likely built before it was. Yet something happened to the culture that built the pyramids, and when Khufu came on the scene, he naturally chose the most impressive structure--the Great Pyramid--as his own, and his heirs took turns in claiming the rest. What event could have brought death and destruction to this ancient civilization that is referred to in Egyptian lore as being inhabited by gods of the First Time?”
― Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs

“The earth is a dynamic place [...] with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can't be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won't work, either, because they were never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts themselves may obviously be ancient.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Water is soft to the touch, but hard enough to erode rock.”
― T.J. Burr