Quotes from Richard Powers

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.

All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember

What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump?

It's a rare week when we dead-to-be don't surrender a few more minutes of our souls to the overflowing archives.

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute. You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman's song flows deep under the river.

a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems.

The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.

First there was nothing. Then there was everything. Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.

The secret of life; plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.

The understory fills up with tracks like longhand accusations scribbled on the snow.

We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els's damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

The wrong people have all the rights.

She runs the entire meal down the garbage disposal and goes hungry, a hunger more wonderful than any meal.

What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.

It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant's, the planet's, brain.

We're shaped to think the things we want will make us happy. But shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting. Wanting is what having wants to recover.

Do not invent anything; simply discover it.

great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.