Quotes from Richard Powers

first group of subjects—the "targets"—entered emotional states in response to external prompts, while researchers scanned relevant regions of their brains using fMRI. The researchers then scanned the same brain regions of a second group of subjects—the "trainees"—in real time.

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only aslightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

In the dark, she asks, What are you thinking? He's thinking that his life has reached its zenith, this very day. That he has lived to see everything he wants. Lived to see himself happy.

EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY turns her into someone else. Patricia blooms like something southern-facing. The air of the sixties crackles as she crosses campus, a change in the weather, the smell of days lengthening, the scent of possibility breaking the cast of outdated thought, a clear wind rolling down from the hills.

Apparently God had made life on one planet only, and only one country of that planet's dominant species needed to manage it.

AI monitored the neural activity and sent auditory and visual cues to steer the trainees toward the targets' prerecorded neural states. In this way, the trainees learned to approximate the patterns of excitation in the targets' brains, and, remarkably, began to report having similar emotions.

is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.

Neelay, please

1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear.

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

whatever work your hands can do, do now, for there is no work for you in that place where you are going.

The phone rings, but she doesn't pick up. It's one of three men whose beliefs about her logistics she can no longer keep straight.

Holy jump up and sit down.

Public judgment is nothing but shared schizophrenia

THEY SHARE A LOT, ASTRONOMY AND CHILDHOOD. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out. For

People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end.

But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they're a day. She wouldn't be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years. That's why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres.

Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.

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

Priži?r?ti sodai visi panaš?s. O kiekvienas laukinis sodas laukinis savaip.