Quotes from Richard Powers

Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted.

it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear. She's

I didn't know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. I made enough mistakes on any one day to scar him for life. My only hope was that all the errors somehow canceled each other out.

Ingenious, really: you pour junk-raised cash into a hostile takeover and sell the debt to your savings and loan, which the public ultimately must bail out. Then you mortgage the company to the hilt to pay off the funny money, loot the pension fund, run through the reserves, sell off everything of value, and dispose of the remaining bankrupt husk for whatever you can get. Magic! Loot that pays you extra to plunder it.

The postdoc turns into an adjunct position. She makes almost nothing, but life requires little. Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status.

Her citation for unlawful assembly costs Mimi $300. It's not a bad deal. She has paid twice as much for a winter coat that gave her half the satisfaction.

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

They can't believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all.

All around them spreads a phantasmagoric, Ordovician fairy tale.

Of course I'm ill, I'm alive aren't I?

You live between three trees.

Her staff tells her not to, but she cites the numbers. Wasn't Shaw right about how the mark of true intelligence is to be moved by statistics? Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees. Half the woody species on the planet, gone by this new century's end.

And soon enough, she was sold on the fine art of hang gliding above the busy earth.

Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

She drops the towel and splays into bed. The fall into the blankets lasts forever and keeps improving.

Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. as certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. there is no knowing for a fact. the only dependable things are humility and looking.

But confirmation bias will always beat out common sense.

Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession.

She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

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

We'll live and trade and make deals and have love affairs, all in symbol space. The world will be a game, with on-screen scores. And all this?" He waves, as people do on phones, even knowing Chris can't see him. "All the things you say people really want? Real life? Soon we won't even remember how it used to go.