Quotes from Richard Powers

it's easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

CHRISTMAS EVE: There's a fire blazing in the fireplace, food enough for five thousand, and a new TV as big as Wyoming tuned to a football game no one cares about.

people see better what looks like them.

In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things.

Someone who doesn't even know she's been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.

Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight.

Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light. It tilts the prospects for life a little.

Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

On segregation, the presidency has held silent since Reconstruction.

The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine. "Well," the man on the ground says, "I'm sticking it to the old bastard now!

À ce stade tardif de l'histoire, tout n'était que marketing. Les universités étaient contraintes de développer leur marque. Toute action charitable devait battre tambour. Les amitiés se mesuraient en partages, en likes, en liens. Poètes et prêtres, philosophes et pères de jeunes enfants : nous étions tous engagés dans un business total et sans fins.

palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.

Aly affirmait souvent - à moi, aux parlementaires locaux, à ses collègues, aux abonnés de son blog, à qui voulait l'entendre - que si une masse critique de gens, si modeste soit-elle, retrouvait la conscience du lien qui nous unit, l'économie deviendrait écologie.

At one in a million, there are roughly ten million of them in the Milky Way alone.

The tens of thousands of fans posting to online forums have more control over what happens next than any of the upper brass.

He wanted drama and showdown and righteous calls for justice from concerned citizens. Instead, he got America.

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning.

the country's bean curve. Or else they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They'd become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.

Of course, grief. Grief for a thing too big to see.

Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. 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.

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.