Quotes from Richard Powers

Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

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.

listen to what other people called silence

He drove, to her direction. They followed a suite of quiet residential streets, emerging onto a commercial boulevard. They said nothing, as if they were a sunset couple taking their ten thousandth car ride together in this life. He wanted to give her the wheel, to see if she still drove like she was sailing an ice boat across a windy northern lake.

People want a better story than they get." The wild-haired sadhu leans forward so fast he almost pitches out of his wheelchair. "Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

He's reached the age when dead is the new normal.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

He looks out the many-paned kitchen window. Through the Hoel Chestnut, the sky is so stupid with blue that it looks like it was slathered on by a primary-schooler with finger paints.

The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.

Sih Hsuin gasps. "Look the color!" The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green.

Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except in the daily life she leads. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

But he'd survived his mother's death. I figured he'd survive my best intentions.

The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

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

couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

This is what people do—solve their own problems in others' lives.

Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

It's sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it's a million.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: the problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

Something marvelous is happening underground, something we're just starting to learn how to see.

All three of them chuckle. But the chuckle is like pressing on a wound. Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them.

When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests. . . . It