Quotes from Richard Powers

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils.

With all those places to live? How come nobody's anywhere?

The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits. "Someday, it may hold all the plans we have.

Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?" "Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain't it, kiddo?

once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.

Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage.

If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn't have to choose between the Earth's interests and ours. They'd be the same!

Tecumseh tried to unite the scattered nations under the banner of Crane Power, but the Hopi mark for the crane's foot became the world's peace symbol.

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. 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. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say.

She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back.

The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

Two barred owls traded their call-and-response: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? Who would ever cook for this boy, aside from me? I couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet. Maybe I didn't want him to. I liked him otherworldly.

The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will.

He lies still in the dark, hungry, listening to the birds discuss life in a thousand ancient dialects: bickering, turf war, recollection, praise, joy.

We live suspended between love and ego.

We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.

Ao testemunhar o fracasso da medicina perante o meu filho, desenvolvi uma teoria esdrúxula: A vida é algo que temos de parar de corrigir. O meu pequeno era um universo de bolso que eu jamais poderia aspirar a sondar. Cada um de nós é uma experiência, e nem sequer sabemos o que está a experiência a testar. Ninguém é perfeito. Mas, caramba, todos ficamos tão lindamente aquém.

So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don't see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

legend crystallized her life (Sarah Bernhardt) until she became her observers' rumors. At the end, we all become edited copy.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress' name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!

Which is bigger, outer space or inner?

Quando rientrai in ufficio, l'immagine della donna che sale per le scale era diventata, a furia di riproiettarmela nella mente, una di quelle repliche di spettacoli in seconda serata di cui vorresti vedere una versione restaurata (p. 310)

Almost every part of need is created by a reflex, phantasmal, and democratic committee whose job is to turn one season's necessities into the next's yard sales. He

His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.