344 Quotes by Richard Powers

Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

This is her freedom. This one. The freedom to be equal to the terrors of the day.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Her real life starts this night - a long, postmortem bonus round. Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself. Human estimation can no longer touch her. She's free now to experiment. To discover anything.

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.

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.

But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow.

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

The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.