Quotes from Richard Powers

All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space

They wouldn't know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.

But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone

We have a Midas problem. There's no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.

There's a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked. Aliens land on Earth. They operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans. He can't remember how the story ends. It doesn't matter. Every branch's tip has its own new bud.

People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It's easy. We don't need to get better. We're already us. And everything that is, is ours.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down.

Now they need only learn what life wants from humans.

the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight's desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations.

We are not...wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.

We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it.

Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

And yet, places remember what people forget.

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

ecosystems tend towards diversity, and markets do the opposite

All that's left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might ever want.

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?