Quotes from Richard Powers

There's a whole lot of comfort in saying nothing.

What do I do now, for the next forty years? What work can't the efficiency of unified mankind chop into pure fertilizer?

He held up his hands to the moonlit mountain evidence. The wind-bent trees. The roar of the nearby river. The electrons tumbling down the staircase of their atoms in this singular atmosphere. His face, in the dark, struggled for accuracy. This rich. That's how rich.

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people. You should be studying everyone who thinks that only people matter.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. All the drama of the world is gathering underground—massed symphonic choruses that Patricia means to hear before she dies.

After two decades with his shoulders up near his ears, bracing for this hammer fall, his long flinch is over at last.

Old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity. . . .

I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don't worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

In fact, it's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

It 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.

You can travel everywhere, just by standing still.

People, God love 'em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.

These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.

Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

the sadness of completion.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

Ese es el problema de la gente, la raíz de todo. La vida pasa a su lado desapercibida. Aquí mismo, muy cerca de ellos. En la creación del suelo. En el ciclo del agua. En el intercambio de nutrientes. En la formación del clima. En la construcción de la atmósfera. En la alimentación, curación y refugio de más tipos de criaturas de las que son capaces de contar.

Los viejos árboles son nuestros padres, acaso los padres de nuestros padres. Si aprendierais los secretos de la Naturaleza, derrocharíais más humanidad

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.

Soon his eyes close on their own accord, and he's swept back into sleep, that nightly place of plantlike deliverance.

Muziek dient ertoe ons eraan te herinneren dat we maar heel kort een lichaam hebben.

Quédate quieto. Espera. Algo en el solitario superviviente sabe que se puede resistir más allá de la irrefutable ley del Ahora.

Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered. ON THE SIDE of the other trailer, Watchman paints words in an alphabet wild and vivid.

Trouble, like the atmosphere, flows everywhere, in currents beyond the power of humans to predict or control.