Quotes from Richard Powers

Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory. It's called genes.

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.' " The Chinese engineer smiles. "Good one." " 'When is the next best time? Now.' " "Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all

Buddha's words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.

We've learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn't make it any less kind.

It's so simple," she says. "So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don't see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet's lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.

Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

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.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

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

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

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

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.