Quotes from Richard Powers

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

His words of thanks contain four of the top six releasers for producing action patterns in someone else: reciprocity, scarcity, validation, and appeal to commitment. He hides the evidence of his begging under another trick gleaned from Chapter 12: If you want a person to help you, convince them that they've already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.

But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.

What else is there to say, to a bear? "Apologize! 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.

Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

He'll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong.

No one can ever be abandoned, anywhere, ever. Full-out, four-alarm, symphonic narrative mayhem plays out all around them. She has no idea, and there's no way he can let her know. Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

Men are worthless; they always think the issue is what's at issue.

Staré stromy sú naÅ¡imi rodi?mi a rodi?mi naÅ¡ich rodi?ov, náhodou. Ak máÅ¡ pochopiÃ…Â¥ tajomstvá Prírody, musíÅ¡ si viac cvi?iÃ…Â¥ ?udskosÃ…Â¥.

For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn't.

No one can ever be abandoned, anywhere, ever. Fullout, four-alarm, symphonic narrative mayhem plays out all around them. She has no idea, and there's no way he can let her know. Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

Civilization will fade away, but that will go on forever.

Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber's suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

Her mind has nothing even faintly resembling a plan. But she remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow.

So, what are you saying? That this was all some kind of vicarious fantasy? The road not taken? In a way. I was . . . I was trying . . . Oh, shit. Her hand rose and her eyes widened. You were composing. In DNA? It did sound ludicrous. But what was music, ever, except pure play?

She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe.

Musicians speak of bliss, but that's just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control.

My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

And Nick was gone, reeled out on a leash long enough to reach the Chicago Loop, with the freedom to test all the flaws inherent in his own desire.

But it's Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you'd be well advised not to take at face value.

Douglas Pavlick works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. 'Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

This land of animated wishes will expand without limits. It will fill with richer, wilder, more surprising life beyond life. The map will grow as full as the thing it stands for. And still people will be hungry and alone.