Quotes from Richard Powers

All around her, the forest reels from the hottest, driest year since the beginning of record-keeping. Yet another freak, once-in-a-century event, almost annual these days. Fires are popping up all over the park. Code Red every third day.

The many uncatalogued volatile compounds breathed out by needles at night slow her heart rate, soften her breathing, and, if she's right, even alter her mood and thoughts. So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered.

And there's only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

Everything about her felt familiar

The blackest despair at the heart of them gets pressed to diamond.

A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.

She has lived far from commerce for decades, and yet her name is a hot commodity, bought and sold endlessly as she sits in her cabin reading Thoreau. She hopes the buyers aren't paying much. No: she hopes they're being extorted.

Trees know when we're close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods

You're self-reliant. Like your trees." "But that's just it, Dennis. They aren't self-reliant. Everything out here is cutting deals with everything else." "That's what I think, too." She laughs at the purity of his hunch.

He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being.

leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. "There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.

The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.

There are things in here worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no amount of civilizing will ever tame.

The tree bulks out. Its bark spirals upward like Trajan's Column. Its scalloped leaves carry on turning sunlight into tissue. It more than abides; it flourishes, a globe of green health and vigor. And

We're sorry. We didn't know how hard it is for you to grow back.

Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.

Here's a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren't shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate?