Quotes from Richard Powers

lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there's a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They're learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven't even identified.

The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.

Her breakthrough comes as breakthroughs often do: by long and prepared accident.

him. It came from 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.

inhabit that place. Wherever

And she takes him like someone who's sure that life has need of her.

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 we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

life is trying to say something no one hears.

SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston?

When is the next best time? Now.' " "Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

The canopy is a colander stippling the beetle-swarmed surfaces with specks of sun.

What she likes and doesn't, when she isn't lying the lazy lie of decency.

She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she'd be ready for anything the next morning.

Chester's death had almost killed him. All the grief over Alyssa that he'd suppressed in order to protect me tore out of him when the crippled old beast gave up.

But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

Humans are so frail. How have they survived long enough to wreak all the shit they have?

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

Earth's atmosphere at different times in history." You can't predict the past, Dad. "You can if you don't know it yet.

You're the last bearable thing left to me, aside from death.

He stands near the planting, its black ring of soil like a promise at his feet.

Their eyes smiled at the best joke in creation, while their shoulders bowed under the weight of a thing too heavy to bear.

What else is there to say to a bear? 'Apologize!' I tell him. People very stupid. They forget everything--where they come from, where they go. I say, 'Don't worry. People leaving this world very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.