Quotes from Richard Powers

Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

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.

The accumulated possessions of generations disperse like wind-borne pollen.

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

We only see things that look like us.

After tens of thousands of pages, they've circled back to Tolstoy and are now a good inch and a half into Anna Karenina. Dot resumes the story with no trace of self-consciousness or shame, no hint that art and life have enrolled in the same drawing class. And that, for Ray, is 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.

MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.

Hulking conifers that sprout adventitious roots high in the canopy that dip back down to feed on the mats of soil accumulating in the vees of their own branches.

the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other

auto-suggestion.

He is no longer the man imprisoned by all the wrong answers at the end of his interrupted life. All at once my father is a child, as uncertain, terrified, and abandoned to the terrible abundance of being alive as I am.

Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There's work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

When she speaks again, the softness shatters him. "I never knew how strong a drug other people are." "The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused." "How long does it take to . . . detox?" He considers. "Nobody's ever clean.

But America, it turns out, really is the greatest country. The people are so kind, the land is rich beyond imagining, and the authorities will cut a deal for useful information, even after booking you for multiple crimes.

those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests. . . . It will take years for the picture to emerge. There

He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.

There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.

seems most of nature isn't red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.

The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.