Quotes from Richard Powers

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

The massively parallel online experience will go on, faithful to the tyranny of the place it pretends to escape.

When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.

A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone—choose your schizophrenia.

There are girls, but they baffle him. They pretend to be stupid, by way of protective coloration. Passive, still, and cryptic. They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. Then resent when you do.

plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.

But it's the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious? Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull's horn. And? What does? Mostly other people.

I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

And what do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow.

Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them." The only question is whether they'll talk again, before the end.

And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

The law is simply human will, written down.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

Creatures, all of whome heard humans and knew them as just a part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge, for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.

She's an animal, a mere avatar. The other woman, too—stuff-imprisoned spirit, deluded into thinking it's autonomous. And yet conjoined, linked to each other, a pair of local gods who have lived and felt all things.

chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

Does it make any difference at all if it happened anywhere else? it happened here. that's everything, right?

I told him what some astronomers now thought: a billion or more planets at least as lucky as ours in the Milky Way alone. In a universe ninety-three billion light-years across, Rare Earths sprang up like weeds.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.