Quotes from Richard Powers

The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man ... Unless man .

This is what people do- solve their own problems in others' lives.

THE LAWS THAT GOVERN THE LIGHT FROM A FIREFLY in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthlings have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

But finally, the sunlight's blaze doesn't threaten the yellow of a flower. We only resent what we can still hope to be.

The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they're forced to share.

Dorothy doesn't mind skipping the author's philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death.

Again, that unreachable future opened up in front of them through a crack in the air. Again, they drew near to enter it. The wilder her feelings, the more she doubted. The man's visit was brief, lucky, mad. But anything more than one illicit afternoon outside Independence Hall would be impossible. Surely he saw that.

Life's moment is here. A test that it has not yet had.

May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering.

The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes.

If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you'll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century's soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can't even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.

The store is a drag show of well-being and mirth.

THEIR FIRSTBORN DIES in infancy, killed by a thing that doesn't yet have a name. There are no microbes, yet. God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.

Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

Well-being is like a virus. One self-assured person at home in this world can infect dozens of others. Wouldn't you like to see an epidemic of infectious well-being?

Thank you for the baskets and the boxes. Thank you for the

God only knew what the eleven-year-old might confess to me about the things I was right now doing wrong.

The only thing that will kill you is failing to leap.

When her eyes open again, truths rush into her head. Like Enlightenment, but without the glow.

She quoted from The Country of Surprise: "Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory.

He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters.

When the wind stops, the stillness suspends them between two eternities, entirely in the caress of here and now.