Richard Powers Quotes

Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

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

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

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

Do not invent anything; simply discover it.

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.

Creation is much in need of ordering.

Maybe it's useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

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.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

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.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plan a tree? Twenty years ago.

Every boy carries a variation on hanging himself in the backyard branches in the rain. At least the one I saw did. I love nobody. I feel I am on the verge of loving everybody. Then I step outside my room. And he is waiting there.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

CHRISTMAS EVE: There's a fire blazing in the fireplace, food enough for five thousand, and a new TV as big as Wyoming tuned to a football game no one cares about.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

In fact, it's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. 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.

On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. (24)

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he'll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you've loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment.

I like to travel and connect.

Life became an interruption of my description of it.

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

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.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible.

When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways.

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 ...

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

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.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

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

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.

Time didn't age you; memory did.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator's mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here's spring.

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.

Do you run away or toward?

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.

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?

Lenny breaks her elbow, by accident. In self-defense, he keeps telling anyone who'll listen. That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

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

In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

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

There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.
(page 330)

My whole lift, I've been an outsider. But many have been out there with me. We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. We found that trees take care of each other. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren't shaped to see. Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

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.

When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don't belong to you anyway. It's not yours to hide.

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.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

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

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.

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

Life is nothing but mutual infection.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public.

All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space

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.

We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.

A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

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.

If you want a person to help you, convince them that they've already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.

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.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

...ecosystems tend towards diversity, and markets do the opposite

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.

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.

A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone - choose your schizophrenia.

Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder.

Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight's desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations.

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

We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

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.

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.

Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.

What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

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

She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.