Greenland Quotes

The most remote place I've been to was in Greenland. I remember setting out for a solo hike from a small cabin, itself several hours' boat ride from the nearest settlement. ~ Michelle Paver

I took quite an interest in polar expeditions. And I've been familiar with explorers who were still investigating polar zones, especially Greenland, with dog sleighs. What matters with dog sleighs is the guide. The guide is often a female dog, who is particularly subtle, and knows there's a crevice 25 or 30 meters ahead. Yet we can't see it under the snow. So we shall say she is violent because she warns the dog sleighs they're going to fall into the crevice, a 60 to 70 meter drop into a hole, and that will be it, death. Well, maybe I have the astuteness of a female dog leading dog sleighs, nothing more than that. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

I can't tell you what I look like. I look in the mirror and see
nothing but space. Space reflecting space, that's what the
mirror shows. It figures because Grandmamma said I was
nothing but dirt. Dirt under her feet she'd say. Dirt she needed
to keep kicking out of the way. Grandmamma said I wasn't
sweeping-up kind of dirt; I was the kind of dirt you needed to
kick and scrape off the bottom of your shoes. ~ Jan Fink

This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum--'a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,' as he puts it now--'so we know that was the length of the impact event because there's very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It's pretty well locked in place. ~ Graham Hancock

It was a nightmare. The band had to tour Greenland by bus. ~ Fred Schneider

Plotting is like sex. Plotting is about desire and satisfaction, anticipation and release. You have to arouse your reader's desire to know what happens, to unravel the mystery, to see good triumph. You have to sustain it, keep it warm, feed it, just a little bit, not too much at a time, as your story goes on. That's called suspense. It can bring desire to a frenzy, in which case you are in a good position to bring off a wonderful climax. ~ Colin Greenland

She raised her sad blue eyes to mine. "It's going to be so boring here without you. And I'm going to have to deal with Grandmother on my own! You need to e-mail, text, call, send smoke signals
whatever
and tell me everything you're doing."
I laughed. "Yes, I know. Every day. I promise. ~ Shannon Greenland

Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink...The French were pleased with the putrid effluvia of animal food; and so were the Hottentots in Africa, and the Savages in Greenland; and that the Negroes on the coast of Senegal would not touch fish till it was rotten; strong presumptions in favour of what is generally called stink, as those nations are in a state of nature, undebauched by luxury, unseduced by whim and caprice: that he had reason to believe the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency... ~ Tobias Smollett

By December an elastic skin of ice reached out hundreds of miles into the sea, rolling with every wave. ~ Will Chancellor

Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first. ~ Colin Greenland

He was right; I was amazing. ~ Shannon Greenland

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions. ~ Bill Bryson

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body. ~ Annie Dillard

Was it because a lot of the heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? ... Perhaps all of these things are going on? ~ Kevin E. Trenberth

In fact the Chinese, the Russians, Eskimos from Greenland, and sub-Saharan Africans are all getting fatter, as is every other population when economic conditions improve and there is increased access to cheaper food. ~ James B. Johnson

THE SPECIALISTS MODEL SPY:
"Sorry," David mumbles right before crushing his mouth to mine.
Oh my God, I'm sixteen, and I've never been kissed. Please let me be doing this right.
Except ... this is it? This is about as exciting as kissing my laptop. ~ Shannon Greenland

The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination. ~ Jon Krakauer

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding. ~ Jared Diamond

It wouldn't bother me in the least if all the dogs in the world weere placed in a large sack and taken to some distant island - Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each other's anuses to their hearts' content and would never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this roundup is poodles. Poodles I would shoot.
To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of the, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect. ~ Bill Bryson

It is a very remarkable fact that the species of shell-fish common to Greenland and Finmark are not all inhabitants of deep or moderately deep water ... That these littoral mollusks indicate by their presence on both sides of the Atlantic, some ancient continuity or contiguity of coast-line is what I firmly believe. ~ Edward Forbes

When you have seen the whole world, the old words said, there is always Greenland left. ~ Claire North

Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book. ~ Jared Diamond

(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964)
"How do you find America?"
"Turn left at Greenland. ~ Ringo Starr

Like there's actually a need for Greenland. You can get ice at 7-Eleven. ~ Steve Kluger

Greenland is a wonderful country. ~ Frederik, Crown Prince Of Denmark

The likelihood is that any English-speaking skier has more words for different types of snow than any inhabitant of Alaska or Greenland. ~ Larry Trask

He stretched his arm above my head, and my heart skipped a beat. "I've been thinking about this a lot." "This?" David toyed with the hair on top of my head. "This." "K-kissing?" He pressed his body against mine, and I stopped breathing. "Speaking of which." "I haven't brushed my teeth," I blurted, then realized what an extremely stupid thing that was to say. His eyes crinkled. "Hmmm, did you brush them this morning?" "Yes," I croaked. "Good." He tilted his head. "Bu - ~ Shannon Greenland

If this ice melts in Greenland it can shut down the Gulf Current. ~ Jay Inslee

Canada and Russia and Greenland will stake new claims in once-frozen waters. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Sometimes I'd like to have a conversation with a friend in a restaurant without feeling I'm being watched. At this rate I will have to go on holiday to Greenland. But maybe the Eskimos would know me. ~ Fernando Torres

One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die. ~ Jared Diamond

Where will that be?' 'Either Greenland or Iceland.' 'How shall we know which is which?' 'If it's green, it'll be Iceland. If it's icy it'll be Greenland. ~ Ernest Schofield

Some would think the leader of a people should be a model of what to strive for. But maybe God knew trying to be perfect is just not healthy, or maybe God could not find any perfect human beings. Maybe it's just not possible to be perfect. ~ Seth Greenland

Although there is a human settlement at Jakobshavn, Greenland is an inhuman landscape of never-ending wastes. ~ Richard Davenport-Hines

I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited. ~ Andrew Bird

I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Twenty years before, she had sailed west from Greenland off the edge of the known world. She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland's founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid's second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At ~ Nancy Marie Brown

I'm quite happy trekking around Greenland on my own, but those big book tours in America or the Far East are the only time I ever really feel lonely. ~ Michelle Paver

I am involved in making measurements in polar oceans, and they are changing more than anything else. I think we have to be prepared for major changes associated with the melting of floating ice and the melting of the Greenland glacier. ~ Walter Munk

Turn left at Greenland.... ~ John Lennon

I once saw a lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving south, which of course will affect the atmosphere and us generally, and it'll happen more and more. ~ Ralph Steadman

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year. ~ Graham Hancock

On his last voyage he had seemed on the brink of success and had stood in the prow reciting a grand poem of his own composition to a dim blue promontory in which he recognized one of the capes of Greenland. But it is idle to deny that the general feeling was dampened somehow, when they discovered it was the Cape of Good Hope. In short, the admiral was one of those who keep the world young. ~ G.K. Chesterton

To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales. So, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages, ~ Peter Heather

Nearly 90 per cent of the planet's ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland. ~ Bill Bryson

Cloaks are nice. You can wear a cloak and have nothing on under it at all. And you can go anywhere you want like that! ~ Colin Greenland

For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist. ~ Moby

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it. ~ Lester R. Brown

Yes, I once was the toast of two continents! ( ... Greenland & Australia). ~ Dorothy Parker