Quotes from Richard Powers

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

We don't make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival

Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.

Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it's almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.

He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

But hope and truth do nothing for humans without use. In the clumpy, clumsy fingerpaint of words, she searches for the use of Old Tjikko, up on that barren crest, endlessly dying and resurrecting in every change of climate. His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we to trees?

She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared.

A country watches dumbstruck as New England's priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.

There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet's surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35.786 km upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high.

Don't worry if your job is small and your rewards are few. Even the mighty Ironwood was once a nut, like you.

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

Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths.

Life is nothing but mutual infection.

Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets—tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.

Tagore said, Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Yesterday's political criminals are on today's postage stamps!

There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.

Do you run away or toward?

Isn't the point of music to move listeners? Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits. And tradition? Real composers make their own.