Volcano Crater Quotes

What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire (HENRY DAVID THOREAU, JOURNAL)

Volcanoes be in Sicily And South America I judge from my Geography– Volcanoes nearer here A lava step at any time Am I inclined to climb– A Crater I may contemplate Vesuvius at Home.

in about 5600 BC the Mount Mazama volcano in Oregon erupted, raining rock and burning ash for years, and leading to the many years of rainfall that eventually filled the volcanic crater today called Crater Lake.

Lava oozed up from the centre of the crater like blood from a wound. As the flaming lava touched the water it hissed and groaned. She feared she would be boiled alive.

In the depths of our crater lake, everything is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remains of some faint, distant memory. At these depths there's no sign of life. I don't know how long she looks at me—not at me, maybe, but at the spot where I am. Time's rules don't apply here.

Yes," he replied, "absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me." "She will have nothing to eat--you will starve her," observed Adèle. "I shall gather manna for her morning and night; the plains and hell-sides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adèle." "She will want to warm herself; what will she do for a fire?" "Fire rises out of the lunar mountains; when she is cold, I'll carry her up to a peak and lay her down on the edge of a crater." "Oh, she'll be uncomfortable there! And her clothes, they will wear out; how can she get new ones?" Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. "Hem!" said he. "What would you do, Adèle? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow." "She is far better as she is," concluded Adèle, after musing some time; "besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon. If I were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you.

Adèle heard him, and asked if she was to go to school “sans mademoiselle?” “Yes,” he replied, “absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.” “She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her,” observed Adèle. “I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adèle.” “She will want to warm herself: what will she do for a fire?” “Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I’ll carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater.” “Oh, qu’ elle y sera mal—peu comfortable!  And her clothes, they will wear out: how can she get new ones?” Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled.  “Hem!” said he.  “What would you do, Adèle?  Cudgel your brains for an expedient.  How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think?  And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow.

Maybe she's not looking at me, but beyond me. In the depths of our crater lake, all is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remnants of some faint, distant memory.

And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano.

The right place; that was what he was looking for. The right place. Place was all important, place meant everything. Take this rock… "Take you, rock," he said. He squinted at it. Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the volcano forms part of an island in a big inland sea. The inland sea is like a giant lake on a continent and the continent is like an island sitting in the seas of the planet. The planet is like an island on the sea of space within its system, and the system floats within the cluster, which is like an island in the sea of the galaxy, which is like an island in the archipelago of of its local group, which is an island within the universe; the universe is like an island floating in a sea of space in the Continua, and they float like islands in the Reality, and… But down through the Continua, the Universe, the Local Group, the Galaxy, the Cluster, the System, the Planet, the Continent, the Island, the Lake, the Island… the rock remained. AND THAT MEANT THE ROCK, THE CRAPPY AWFUL ROCK HERE WAS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, THE CONTINUA, THE WHOLE REALITY!

The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.

A newly formed planet appeared on the large screen. its surface was till red-hot, like a piece of charcoal fresh out of the furnace. Time passed at the rate of geological eras, and the planet gradually cooled. The color and patterns on the surface slowly shifted in a hypnotic manner. A few minutes later, an orange planet appeared on the screen, indicating the end of the simulation run. "The computations were done at the coarsest level; to do it with more precision would require over a month." Green Glasses moved the mouse and zoomed in on the surface of the planet. The view swept over a broad desert, over a cluster of strangely shaped, towering mountain peaks, over a circular depression like an impact crater. "What are we looking at?" Yang Dong asked. "Earth. Without life, this is what the surface of the planet would look like now." "But . . . where are the oceans?" "There are no oceans. No rivers either. The entire surface is dry." "Your'e saying that without life, liquid water would not exist on Earth?" "The reality would probably be even more shocking. Remember, this is only a coarse simulation, but at least you can see how much of an impact life had in the present state of the Earth." "But--" "Do you think life is nothing but a fragile, thin, soft shell clinging to the surface of this planet?" "Isn't it?" "Only if you neglect the power of time. If a colony of ants continue to move clods the size of grains of rice, they could remove all of Mount Tai in a billion years. As long as you give it enough time, life is stronger than metal and stone, more powerful than typhoons and volcanoes.

Yes,’ he replied, ‘absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.’ ‘She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her,’ observed Adele. ‘I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adele.’ ‘She will want to warm herself: what will she do for a fire?’ ‘Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I’ll carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater.’ ‘Oh, qu’ elle y sera mal—peu comfortable! And her clothes, they will wear out: how can she get new ones?’ Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. ‘Hem!’ said he. ‘What would you do, Adele? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow.

less rotted and she nibbles it smiling. “Look,” I show her, “there’s holes in my cake where the chocolates were till just now.” “Like craters,” she says. She puts her fingertop in one. “What’s craters?” “Holes where something happened. Like a volcano or an explosion or something.” I put the green chocolate back in its crater and do ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, boom. It flies up into Outer Space and around into my mouth. My birthday cake is the best thing I ever ate. Ma isn’t hungry for any right now. Skylight’s sucking all the light away, she’s nearly black. “It’s the spring equinox,” says Ma, “I remember it said on TV, the morning you were born. There was still snow that year too.” “What’s equinox?” “It means equal, when there’s the same amount of dark and light.” It’s too late for any TV because of the cake, Watch says 08:33. My yellow hoody nearly rips my head off when Ma’s pulling it. I get into my sleep T-shirt and brush my teeth while Ma ties up the trash bag and puts it beside Door with our list that I wrote, tonight it says Please, Pasta, Lentils, Tuna, Cheese (if not too $), O.J., Thanks. “Can we ask for grapes? They’re good for us.” At the bottom Ma puts Grapes if poss (or any fresh fruit or canned). “Can I have a story?” “Just a quick one. What about… GingerJack?” She does it really fast and funny, Gingerjack jumps out of the stove and runs and rolls and rolls and runs so nobody can catch him, not the old lady or the old man or the threshers or

Whenever I am near you, my lips tremble, My characters stutter, and my words are lost. My lips wander to hug yours, sounds of my kisses on yours form a melody. Your teeth plant death on my flesh. Walls quiver when you turn stark-naked. I embrace you, I wish I could tear you up, to calm down the flame frenzy within my veins. You, worthy sacrifice, the volcano crater of my depths.

As the sole clergyman, Knox resided in a settlement known as the Bottom, sunk in the elevated crater of an extinct volcano; it could be reached only by climbing up a stony path. Knox

The upper part of the mountain had completely disappeared in a spectacular blast that caused the lower walls of the volcano to collapse inward, creating a huge, circular hole in the ground—a caldera—five miles (8 km) wide. This gradually filled with snowmelt and rainwater to form Crater Lake—with a maximum depth of 1,958 feet (597 m), the deepest lake in the United States. Magma spilled from cracks along the shattered volcanic rim and surged downhill in avalanches that filled nearby valleys with up to three hundred feet (90 m) of hot rock, pumice, and ash. Somewhere between eleven and fourteen cubic miles (not cubic yards, cubic miles, or 46–58 km3) of magma was ejected. A towering column of ash thirty miles (48 km) high rained down for several days on eastern Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and southwestern Canada. An ash layer half an inch (1 cm) thick was measured in Saskatchewan, 745 miles (1,200 km) from its origin.

The surveyors described the landscape as bare and ragged, desolate and rough, punctuated by rocky hills and steep, narrow-ridged mountains of stratified limestone and porphyry, red basalt and igneous rock thrust upward alongside empty craters and extinct volcanos surrounded by broken lava.

Before they depart, Ru looks about him and names the directions: “The east he called Te-hitia-o-te-ra (The-rising-of-the-sun), the west Te-tooa-o-te-ra (The-setting-of-the-sun), the south he named Apato‘a, and the north Apatoerau”—terms we have encountered before, in the margins of Tupaia’s chart. Then, sailing from the west toward the Society Islands, Ru and Hina draw their canoe to each of the islands in turn, naming them in their proper geographic order: first Maupiti, then Bora Bora, then Taha‘a, then Ra‘iatea. A similar sequence occurs in the well-known Hawaiian story of the volcano goddess Pele, who sets out from her home in Kahiki in a canoe belonging to her brother Whirlwind, with Tide and Current as paddlers. Approaching the Hawaiian Islands from the northwest, she reaches first Ni‘ihau, then Kaua‘i, then O‘ahu, then each of the others in turn—following the correct geographic sequence—until, finally, she settles in a crater on the island of Hawai‘i.

The collision of material ejected from the volcano's craters caused a build-up of static electricity in the atmosphere, which when combined with the accumulation of charge from rising hot air and moisture from the crater's meltwater reaching many kilometers up, created a huge amount of electricity that needed to be discharged, leading to spectacular, if hellish, sights.

The immensity of these explosions beggars belief. In the summer of 1962, America buried a nuclear device eight times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima below the arid sandy surface of the Nevada desert. It carved out the largest artificial crater in America, a bowl 1,280 feet across.31 The caldera mostly excavated by Toba’s 74,000-year-old kaboom is 256 times longer. It’s like comparing a firecracker to the Holy Hand Grenade.

A period of renewed heavy bombardment began as large objects were deflected into the inner solar system by recently formed outer planets. The evidence for this is visible on any clear moonlit night. The large, dark marks that make up the features of ‘the man in the Moon’ are easily visible to the unaided eye. Our ancestors also saw these features and believed them to be seas on the surface of the Moon. In reality, they are enormous impact craters – and analysis of the rocks, brought back by the Apollo astronauts, shows that these craters formed 3.8 billion years ago. It seems obvious that similar-sized impacts must have also happened on Earth and that these would have sterilised the surface so that life only just clung on in the deep, dark places of the world. Much of the atmosphere and ocean would have been blasted off our planet in these cataclysms, to be slowly replaced, over millions of years, by exhaust from volcanoes.

We are about to part. Yes, I myself am detached from the convent, to live for a time in the crater of a volcano. I am to be a clerk in a great manufactory, where the workmen are infected with communistic doctrines, and dream of social destruction, the abolishment of masters, — not knowing that that would be the death of industry, of commerce, of manufactures. I shall stay there goodness knows how long, — perhaps a year, — keeping the books and paying the wages. This will give me an entrance into a hundred or a hundred and twenty homes of working-men, misled, no doubt, by poverty, even before the pamphlets of the day misled them. But you and I can see each other on Sundays and fete-days.

The wide sky overhead can seem like an element we're deeply submerged in, one that overflows the mountains rimming the horizon as if these were the walls of an extinct volcano's vast crater, inside of which has arisen a city... The night sky, sponging up light from the city below, is blackish phosphorescence, in which low clouds drift like mesoglea. When the moon is out in late afternoon it looms low over streets and buildings, enormous and pale yellow in the softer blue sky, like a ghostly school bus coming right at us.

South of Marfa is the road to Big Bend, one of the least visited national parks in the country, and also one of the most glorious. On the way, there is a pleasant resort, Cibolo Creek Ranch, built around several old forts inside the crater of an extinct volcano. Roberta and I once stayed there in the off-season, midsummer, and spent out time chasing hummingbirds and the adorable vermilion flycatcher. In more temperate weather, the ranch has served as a getaway for celebrities, including Mick Jagger, Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Willis.