Quotes from Richard Powers

Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. And with those words, she has her book's end.

Anyone who gets righteous...doesn't understand. Understand what? How hopelessly fragile and wrong we all are. About everything.

The trees have vanished and the town forgets. But not the land.

But people aren't alone, and they never have been.

memory is always a collaboration in progress.

The world had become something no schoolchild should be allowed to discover.

Life is something we need to stop correcting.

He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

How would we ever know aliens? We can't even know birds.

Art is not a mobocracy. It's a republic.

Smartphones are miracles, and they've turned us into gods. But in one simple respect, they're primitive: you can't slam down the receiver.

A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

Character is all that matters in the end. It's a child's creed, of course; just one small step up from the belief that the creator of the universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.

A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you'll zag. Creation's Rule Number Two. What's Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul's straight man. Zag when they think you'll zig.

The bird and the fish may fall in love but where will they build their nest?

There's joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you're equal to it.

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear. The (other) man chuckles. We've been trying to tell you that since 1492.

The psyche's job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we'll behave in any situation. We're all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right . But even when the fog is pointed out, we're no better at navigating through it .

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease ...

What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they're seeing.

I never knew how strong a drug other people are.