Quotes from Richard Powers

The psyche's job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we'll behave in any situation. We're all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we're no better at navigating through it.

He can't figure out why people do what they do. His cluelessness only makes others keener to dupe him.

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY dances by in a five-second flip. Nicholas Hoel thumbs through the stack of a thousand photos, watching for those decades' secret meaning. At twenty-five, he's back for a moment on the farm where he has spent every Christmas of his life. He's lucky to be there, given the cancellations. Snowstorms sweep in from the west, grounding planes all over the country

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] 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 [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote - the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass. Ah, but engineers have no use for the past, do they?

His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

Since I don't smoke or drink or swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice.

the greatest mercy fiction gives: proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.

There are so many names for the thing that everyone is scared to death of, and everyone wants to tell you theirs.

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

Her real life starts this night - a long, postmortem bonus round. Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself. Human estimation can no longer touch her. She's free now to experiment. To discover anything.

Els puts his eye to a burst of stars. They cluster, a blue star nursery, spraying out new worlds. He feels like he did two years ago, when he first looked at a glowing stain of cells under the 1,000x objective and realized that life happens elsewhere, on scales that have nothing to do with him.

The fact is, their obsessions interlock. Each has half of a secret message. What else can he do but try to fit the halves together? And if they spin out, wake from the dream with nothing, what has he sacrificed but solitary waiting? Nick sits in his ancestors' empty bedroom after midnight, reading by the lantern's low glow.

I was thinking it's going to be cold again tonight. We may need to zip the bags together. I'm down with that. Every star in the galaxy rolls out above them, through the blue-black needles, in a river of spilled milk. The night sky- the best drug there was, before people came together into something stronger. They zip the bags together. You know, she says, if one of us falls, the other is going with. I'll follow you anywhere.

stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

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.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one

addicted to a rate of stimulations per second that she hasn't entirely kicked.

He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise.

She would tell him—how the towering, teetering pyramid of large living things is toppling down already, in slow motion, under the huge, swift kick that has dislodged the planetary system. 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.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.

They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.

Un figlio scopre sempre le debolezze dei propri genitori. Le percepisce prima ancora delle parole, come una prima e ultima lezione. La debolezza può essere l'unica lezione dei genitori destinata a durare nel tempo. (p. 247)

By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.