Mining Quotes

“Art is a kind of mining," he said. "The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.”
― Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter

“Do you know who profits most in a gold rush? Mining suppliers—merchants. Today that includes marketers, because they're selling an idea or lifestyle. It's why golf's richest men aren't the pro players.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“He remembers what the spiritual visionary, Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota said – man's scratching of the earth causes diseases like cancer. He meant the mining and drilling for coal, gas, oil, uranium. The scratching brings up the things deep in the earth that should have stayed down there.”
― J.J. Brown, Brindle 24

“Silver mining in the United States didn’t start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s,” Louis said. “And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California.”

“It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it’s mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?”

“The problem with the silver fumes,” Louis continued, “is that, over time, they gave the miners delusions. Bad enough that they had to stop mining. Their health deteriorated. And a bunch of them even died.” Hard to make fun of something like that, so Pepper didn’t. “Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, ‘What happened to Mike?’ And the answer was always the same. ‘The Devil in Silver got him.’ ” Louis sat straight and crossed his arms and surveyed the table. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” “You’re saying we’re just making this thing up,” Pepper said quietly. Louis seemed disappointed. He dropped his hands into his lap and folded them there. He looked at his sister and Pepper. He turned his head to take in the other patients gathered with their family members there in the hospital. “I’m saying they were dying,” Louis said. “They definitely weren’t making that up. But it wasn’t a monster that was killing them. It was the mine.”
― Victor LaValle, The Devil in Silver

“What is acted out on the female body parallels the larger practices of domination, fragmentation, and conquest against the earth body, which is being polluted, strip-mined, deforested, and cut up into parcels of private property. Equally, this pattern points to the fragmentation of the psyche, which ultimately underlies and enables all of this damage.”
― Jane Caputi

“Although they probably know that some children were used and some children are used as miners, most adults are ignorant of the chocolate industry’s use of minors.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“Mining is the art of exploiting mineral deposits at a profit. An unprofitable mine is fit only for the sepulcher of a dead mule.”
― T.A. Rickard

“That’s got to stop,” says I. “The idea of any blood-thirsty pirate (Mexican President Diaz) sitting on a throne and reaching across the border to tromp on our Constitution makes my blood boil.” — Mother Jones”
― Jerry Ash, Hellraiser—Mother Jones: An Historical Novel

“Turning back to the crowd I say, “I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And for the reason that he is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the capitalists who placed him here in this building.” — Mother Jones”
― Jerry Ash, Hellraiser—Mother Jones: An Historical Novel

“To the RKO motion picture camera at her 100th birthday party: “I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy the freedom, rights and opportunities guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America.” — Mother Jones”
― Jerry Ash, Hellraiser—Mother Jones: An Historical Novel

“There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.”
― Tim Winton

“Nothing looks the same after a trip to the Congo. The world back home no longer makes sense. It is difficult to reconcile how it even inhabits the same planet. Neatly arranged mountains of vegetables at grocery stores seem vulgar. Bright lights and flushing toilets seem like sorcery. Clean air and water feel like a crime. The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent.”
― Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

“I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.”
― Stephen King, It

“Train hard, fight easy.”
― John Steele

“we fought a lot in welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; Maybe it was because life there was hard and it made the people hard...maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“From space the little world looked like nothing much - perhaps a pitted and decaying pumpkin, dull orange-black in color, with a handful of tiny orbiting craft floating around it like fruit flies. Here and there amber lights shone out of craters in the surface. What seemed to be scores of deformed silver minnows nibbling the pumpkin rind - together with numbers of smaller noshmates - were actually huge transactinide carriers and lesser starships, either taking on fuel or docked nose-to-ground while their crews rested and recreated inside the not so heavenly body.

I have been told that the original Phlegethon of Greek mythology was a fiery river in Hades. Sheltok Concern owned a dozen or so similar way stations with brimstony names - Gehenna, Styx, Sheol, Tophet, Avernus, Niflheim, and the like - that served vessels bound to or fro the terrible R-class worlds where ultraheavy elements are mined.”
― Julian May, The Sagittarius Whorl

“...and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac trades and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins...”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Deanna’s prime business was mining Lantillium, which was used to line blaster emitter barrels and the cores of warp engines (and to a lesser degree, to line the special coffee cups and jugs used to serve Hot Stuff Blend).”
― Christina Engela, Loderunner

“Thus as foreign mining and logging companies open up new areas for new forms of colonial exploitation they set up prostitution industries to service the workers. These industries have a profound effect on local cultures and relations between men and women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade

“Don’t die without mining the gold in your mind.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Even the humans think about killing the humans, especially here. I hate mines, and mining, and humans who work in mining, and of all the stupid mines I can remember, I hate this stupid mine the most. But the humans hate it more.”
― Martha Wells, The Future of Work: Compulsory

“You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same rot, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child-soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got a family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise like a ship you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiled merchandise and the dying.”
― Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83

“Sumone Yiden Smiff was a businessman of note. Was, past tense. Through years of sweat and swearing and amazingly smart (or lucky) deals he’d built up a mining empire that spanned the sum of known space. At 74 years, he had reached the apex of a career stretching half a century. His companies mined precious commodities like Impervium, Obstinatium and Bitanium. He wasn’t really famous, or ostentatious. In fact he only ever made the cover of Fortune One Billion once, twenty-five years ago. He’d never married, had lots of children – light-years apart, apparently.”
― Christina Engela, Dead Man's Hammer

“Death happened often enough that a certain melancholy existed between the young men and women of the little West Virginia town when they made their daily farewells”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator

“Your mind is a gold mine. Dig deep!”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Before You Doubt Yourself: Pep Talks and other Crucial Discussions

“In all these years, he said, he was yet to come across a single gold nugget that brought any real happiness to the person who held it. Long coat bob said his family had found one large nugget long ago, centuries back, that resembled a human hand. And it became so coveted by members of his family that out caused fights between brother and sister, sister and mother, father and son. During one dispute an old woman struck her nephew with the gold hand. The nephew was struck dumb and his mental capacity was like a water hole that could never be more than half full after that. And the old woman was so ashamed by her actions that she begged Long Coat Bob's grandfather, the oldest living member of the family, to hide the gold away in a place where no one else could find it. And any other gold nuggets that were found from that moment on Long Coat Bob's grandfather reasoned, were best hidden away with it too.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“On growing up internationally - from the Daughter of Copper.

And so, with the greatest of ease, both as children and adults, we float back and forth between our two languages and cultures, seamlessly navigating the moments of time and place that define us.”
― Susan Bayless Herrera, Daughter of Copper, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Identity, Growing up on Borrowed Land

“Mastering life's maze means meticulously mapping myriad meanders, mining the maze for a mirrored me.”
― Mehdi Ikhibi

“Aki, with a sharp intake of breath, found herself stepping forward, drawn to the pit as if by some ancestral magnetism. Beside her, the others mirrored her actions, their gasps creating a symphony of awe that filled the clearing. They stood at the brink, peering down, their eyes wide, their mouths open, their faces reflecting a mixture of reverence and wonder. For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath—the sounds of the forest stilled, the leaves of the trees pausing in their rustling whispers, even the air itself waiting in hushed anticipation. Then, as if the pause were too profound to last, the forest sounds returned, but the onlookers remained motionless, transfixed. Aki's heart raced as she reached out tentatively, her fingers hovering just above the copper, feeling the warmth that radiated from it. It was not just metal; it was a piece of history, a fragment of the earth's untold story.”
― David Pompeani, Great Water: The Lost Mines of Lake Superior

“[He, Dan Gertler] made more money for himself and Congolese elites than anyone since perhaps Belgium's King Leopold II”
― Henry Sanderson, Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green