Quotes from Richard Powers

I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.

Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself.

Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon.

Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.

Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

Las cosas pueden viajar a cualquier sitio; para ello, no hay más que permanecer inmóvil.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear.

He's never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.

Ray Brinkman, who spent two decades in the trenches protecting patents, cheers each time the police subdue an anarchist. But Ray Brinkman, whom God stopped with a little backhand flick, is smashing glass.

You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder.

By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that's when the tree of life becomes something else again. That's when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

A woman in the coda of life, raising her eyes and lifting her hands in that moment just before fear turns into knowledge.

look for something in return, but that doesn't make it any less kind." Perhaps unlooked-for kindness along the way

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.

Entire weekends in basements pitching dice and arguing over esoteric role-playing rules with obese, anemic boy-men who tote suitcases full of collectible trading cards.

It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul.

He waits too long, and time replies for him.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness

The past always comes clearer, in the future.