Quotes from Richard Powers

Thank you, she says, following the ancient formula. For all these gifts that you have given. And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, We're sorry. We didn't know how hard it is for you to grow back.

The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment

When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don't belong to you anyway. It's not yours to hide.

zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten.

I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part—the mind, perhaps.

If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity ...

The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

There are no individuals. There aren't even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.

capes and hats and skirts. Thank you for the cradles. The beds. The diapers. Canoes. Paddles, harpoons, and nets. Poles, logs, posts. The rot-proof shakes and shingles. The kindling that will always light." Each new item is release and relief. Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the gratitude spill out. "Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The paneling

Then he woke up from the dream of humankind.

I]t's not the world that needs saving, it's us. For us to be saved, as a lot of the very old myths say, we'll have to come home and be born again.

The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

reporter once asked Rockefeller how much is enough. His answer: Just a little bit more. And that's all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.

How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.

Enlightenment is a shared enterprise. It needs some other voice saying, You are not wrong. . . .

But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

Can you feel it lift and disappear? That standing wave of constant static. The distraction so ubiquitous you never even knew you were wrapped in it. Human certainty. The thing that blinds you to what's right here—gone. He can—can feel it.

IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi's Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard.

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plan a tree? Twenty years ago.

He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, I'm sorry. No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.