Quotes from Richard Powers

Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration — that is where the Aspens grow. . . .

Smart enough to see that you're a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that's going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

How reason is just another weapon of control.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?

Again and again, the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they're fast and fantastic at figuring out who's in and who's out, who's up and who's down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant.

The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD?

Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer...

She becomes her father's star and only pupil for the simple reason that she alone, of all the family, sees what he knows: plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.

The whole race suffered from Capgras. those birds danced like our next of kin, called and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: Imposters. at most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind.

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder.

Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they'll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici. I do no harm by remaining here.

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that." Watchman smiles, tired. "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 moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees.

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.

The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Someday we'll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.