Quotes from Richard Powers

The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.

It seemed to me that half of life's problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.

We are made for art . . . The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

She knows she'll never see him again in this or any life to come. Yet she sees him wherever she looks. That's life; the dead keep the living alive.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it.

But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.

Oddly enough, there's no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.

That's the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

I'll sue for everything they're worth . But all the rights and privileges of fair practice are theirs. Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon.

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Was tonality out there – God-given? Or were those magic ratios, like everything human, makeshift rules to be broken on the way to a more merciless freedom?

The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthling have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It's a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren't alone, and they never have been.

For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate.

I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

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

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...

Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.