Richard Powers Quotes

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them. ~ Richard Powers

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

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? ~ Richard Powers

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 ... ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

Music wasn't about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated? ~ Richard Powers

What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump? ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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) ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

Time didn't age you; memory did. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

I wouldn't need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this--this, the growing rings of light and water and stone--would take up all of me, and be all the words I need. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

The law is simply human will, written down. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

Do you run away or toward? ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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? ~ Richard Powers

Life is nothing but mutual infection. ~ Richard Powers

I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.
I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness's tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.
The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.
Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d'acqua. I'm eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water. ~ Richard Powers

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

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

I like to travel and connect. ~ Richard Powers

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa. ~ Richard Powers

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

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

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

Everything interests me. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

Life became an interruption of my description of it. ~ Richard Powers

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything. ~ Richard Powers

Love for trees pours out of her - the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

...ecosystems tend towards diversity, and markets do the opposite ~ Richard Powers

Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we're near...when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone's desire. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time. ~ Richard Powers

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

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism. ~ Richard Powers

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

Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss. ~ Richard Powers

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

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant's, the planet's, brain. ~ Richard Powers

Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger. ~ Richard Powers

Do not invent anything; simply discover it. ~ Richard Powers

Zag when they think you'll zig. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

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

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. ~ Richard Powers

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. ~ Richard Powers

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted. ~ Richard Powers