Quotes from Richard Powers

People want to grow. Expand their empires. That's why they pay us every month. The place fills in. We make it a little bigger. There's no other way to run a world.

It bruises a little in the freedom of the west, while to the east it spills open like a pomegranate. The phone clicks and goes dead. Olivia hangs up, a newly minted orphan. A thing reaching toward the sun, ready for anything.

The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.

Memory) A few dozen cells, slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that shaped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance.

I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you're my age, we'll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.

Culture) Some part of us could model some other modeler. and out of that simple loop came all the love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts.

We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

A body can take two weeks of anything.

She feeds him and sets him up with the TV. The screen is news, travel, the company of others, a reminder of the luck he'd had all life long and failed to see.

Her supervisor explained that the Family Medical Leave Act did not extend to siblings. A brother, in the eyes of the medical-leave law, was not family.

When it can't go on, that's when this will end. Then they'll never see each other again, except for always.

Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonized mites, bits of insect frass and bird feather. . . . Everything climbs over everything else, fighting for scraps of light. If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.

shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they're fast and fantastic at figuring out who's in and who's out, who's up and who's down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant.

Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end.

Dennis Ward, drops by with little gifts, when he's on site. Wasps' nests. Insect galls. Pretty stones polished by the creeks. Their standing arrangement reminds

Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

I've been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future

A flick of a switch reveals a space half homeless-person's midden, half pharaonic tomb. Talismans everywhere: totems, drawings, and cargo cult, laid out on plywood planks spread across sawhorses.

just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court.

High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize.

A woman of her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can't use her? we're down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she's going to roll over and die?

You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to notice.

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.