Quotes from Richard Powers

Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that's for another trial.

Whole new rooms open up in Adam's brain, ready to be furnished.

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

the beautiful redwood trim paid for by millions of people's desire to live anywhere else but here.

Watchman smiles, tired. "We don't make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural

In the dark-paneled courtroom, her words come out of hiding. Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise.

Adam will preach the point to undergrad psych majors, when he's even older than his father is on the night they pick a tree for unborn Charles. He'll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.

Easy Tree IDs.

She fights to hold on to the thing she has just glimpsed. But traffic, bickering, business: the street's brutality begins to close in. She walks faster, on the brink of the old panic. Everything she has just won begins to fade again into the irresistible force of other people.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each

She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body's provinces across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul's innermost national park.

He has worked hard to disappear into achievement. Twice he has won the university's teaching award, and only last month he was nominated for the APA's Beauchamp Prize for research that empirically advances a materialistic understanding of the human mind. He has performed himself in public so long he's been fooled by his own vita.

She hears him, and understands. This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.

felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines. Their fragrances

They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

He'll spend his life in the service of an immense conspiracy, launched from the Valley of Heart's Delight, to take over the human brain and change it more than anything since writing.

Their fragrances alert

But severed from yourself in the press of a crowd, you head back instinctively to the most recent landmark, hoping the lost other will hit on the same idea.

Inga Alder opened my son's feedback-primed mind to a truth I myself never quite grasped: the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

People. So much pain.

product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.

You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to look at.