Quotes from Richard Powers

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we're near...when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts' daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

It's a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you've already made.

Someday you'll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.

What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions.

If you want a person to help you, convince them that they've already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.