The geography of North Carolina falls naturally into three divisions or sections—the Appalachian Mountains formed mostly by the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, the Middle or Piedmont Plateau, and the Eastern or Tidewater section, also known as the Coastal Plain. North Carolina covers 53,821 square miles (139,396 km2) and is 560 miles (900 km) long by 150 miles (240 km) wide. The physical characteristics of the state can be pictured as a surface spread out upon a vast declivity, sloping down from the summits of the Smoky Mountains, an altitude of near seven thousand feet, to the ocean level.
Read more about Geography Of North Carolina: Blue Ridge/Appalachian Mountains, Piedmont, Coastal Plain, Agriculture, River Systems, Climate
Famous quotes containing the words geography of, geography, north and/or carolina:
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)