Quotes from Richard Powers

Nothing we can do. But at least we can do it together.

Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?" Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. "I don't think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.

It surprises Adam, the proximity of coziness to terror.

Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago." "Yep. And you always said the next best time was now." "Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they've lived through.

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

Lenny breaks her elbow, by accident. In self-defense, he keeps telling anyone who'll listen. That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

Lenny breaks her elbow, by accident. In self-defense, he keeps telling anyone who'll listen. That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

The light switch teases her from across the foyer.

She tried to grin, grateful. Of course: fund raising. The core of every job description in the nation, from schoolchildren on up to the president.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible (p. 423).

TWENTY SPRINGS is no time at all. The hottest year ever measured comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more, almost every one of them among the hottest in recorded history. The seas rise. The year's clock breaks. Twenty springs

I'd been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

It had been a long day, and the thing he wanted to know would take ten years of coursework to grasp. But a child's question was the start of all things.

Utah. She has followed back roads from Las Vegas, capital of clueless sinners, toward Salt Lake, capital of cunning saints.

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?

Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn't make it any less kind." Perhaps

Each one volunteers to be eaten, so others might be spread far afield.

People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment.

His face clouds over with incomprehension. You would know. You'd know, if you saw a pike.

IT'S INDIANA, 1990. Here, five years is a generation, fifty is archaeology, and anything older shades off into legend. And yet, places remember what people forget.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.