Quotes from Richard Powers

In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

Crazy is a species under no threat at all.

Trees give it all away, don't they?

The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being . . . the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.

Such a small difference, between forever and once.

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body's most private moments, something else joins in.

How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.

People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own.

Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.

He's sure his parents must be worried sick. But the only sane thing to do is curl up in the car and sleep for a couple of hours until everything blows over and the plows catch up with God's shit fit.

Creation is much in need of ordering.

The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of "us"—those who are holding rights at the time.

Girls doing science are like bears riding bikes. Possible, but freakish

The bookcases are full of previous resolutions, taken up and shelved. No-Sweat Indian Cooking. A Hundred Hikes in the Greater Yellowstone. A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds. To Eastern Wildflowers. Off the Beaten Path in Europe. Unknown Thailand. Manuals of beer brewing and wine making. Untouched foreign language texts. All those scattered explorations theirs to sample and squander. They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.

You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.

It's a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.