Quotes from Richard Powers

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

I like to travel and connect.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.

Each thing is what it is only through everything else.

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

People aren't the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.

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.

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

You can't come back to something that is gone.

There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the world "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.