Quotes from Richard Powers

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

There's joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you're equal to it.

I'd given up on understanding my own hidden temperament a long time ago. Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths, but most of them were nonlethal.

How is Redbreast's Dad like a piece of toilet paper? He circles Uranus, looking for Klingons.

High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.

But practice pares back the impossible

Could there be whites who might not, after all, hate her on sight for the ungivable forgiveness they needed from her?

I love your smell, she said. I told her, "You don't love me. You love my microbiome.

She might live with anything except being forgiven.

pronounced. Spontaneous improvement no longer seemed likely. Behavioral therapy had

I let the class out, ten minutes early. My students would have to figure out the rest of the origin of life on their own.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. 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. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Down another branch, this one, she shouts, "Here's to unsuicide," and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience.

Down one branch, she lifts the glass to her lips, toasts the room—To Tachigali versicolor—and drinks.

The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, it will follow wherever you go.

She flips open the uppermost notebook, to the page where she has just written: In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

Tall bird stalking. Every five minutes, half a step. The bird was a piece of standing driftwood. Even the fish forgot. When the heron at last jabbed out, Robin shrieked. The strike crossed two meters with barely a lean-in from the bird. It came back upright, a meal the size of astonishment dangling from its mouth. The fish seemed too big to slip down the bird's throat. But that baggy gullet opened, and in another moment, not even a bulge betrayed what had happened.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom.

imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

They used to be everywhere, Dad. Before we got to them. We took over everything! We deserve to be alone.

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

Identity formation and Big Five personality factors among plants rights activists." "Or: Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

Hollywood, without knowing it, has its most magnificent year ever. Never again will it come close to matching this year's product. Gone With the Wind takes the Oscar. But it has stiff competition from Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, and Juarez.

The morning overstays its welcome long before noon.