Quotes from Richard Powers

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. —RACHEL CARSON

On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There's no other explanation: almost all the tree's mass has come from the very air.

Here's the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It's a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It's the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.

If you're holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah.

Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.

Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good - as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain's sting and the smell of living soil - the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.

Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.

Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us.

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free.

CONTROL KILLS CONNECTION HEALS

Zag when they think you'll zig.

Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?

It's amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.