Will the Sphinx of Black Quartz judge my vow?
Granites are intrusive felsic igneous rocks. They cooled slowly enough to have visible crystals. These crystals are mostly quartz and k-feldspars, with a small portion of other minerals, such as muscovite, biotite, or hornblende. Properly, a granite is a felsic rock of which between 10 and 50 percent of the felsic minerals are quartz and between 65 and 90 percent of the feldspars are rich in sodium or potasium. This is a coarse grained (thus slow cooling) granite. - clear large crystals of quartz and orthoclase feldspar (plus in this case, small fraction of muscovite mica). Slowest cooling times let crystals grow very large - up to several meters in size. These very coarse grained rocks are called pegmatites.
Granite weathers into sediments (I assume that is what you mean by the term, its components) by physical and chemical means. Feldspars, amphiboles and micas are (mostly) broken down by chemicals in water, and they become the building blocks for clays with some ions dissolving into water. Resistates, such as quartz, get broken down into smaller and smaller fragments, and become pebbles, sands and silts. This is a simplified explanation; I took many geology classes and read many papers to arrive at my understanding of these processes.
