Quotes from Richard Powers

Everyone's confusing. And everyone's confused

All of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated?

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren't plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

There's a kind of vole that needs old forest. It eats mushrooms that grow on rotting logs and excretes spores somewhere else. No rotting logs, no mushrooms; no mushrooms, no vole; no vole, no spreading fungus; no spreading fungus, no new trees.

People who still love words have to be forgiven everything.

He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.

Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.

It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences.

The forest from the first day of creation. But it turns out Gilgamesh and his punk friend Enkidu have already been through and trashed the place. Oldest story in the world.

In the creature's howling, Els heard the roots of music—the holy society of small discord.

Is the house on fire?" A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. "Yes." "And you want to observe the handful of people who're screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.

If nobody's losing money or getting hurt, the law doesn't give a fuck.

The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They're linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.

it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

She's always in for any game involving pointless risk and temporary oblivion.

He nodded in the dark, confirmed. His hand waved a question across the sky. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn't the night sky full of light? His slow, sad words stiffened the hairs up and down my body. My son had rediscovered Olbers' paradox.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

Everything happening here was already known. Our people said long ago that this day would come. They told of how the forest was about to die, when humans suddenly remembered the rest of their family." And for half the night, the characters sit around the blaze, laughing and listening and whispering and baying at the moon up in the spruces' spires.