344 Quotes by Richard Powers

We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.

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.

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

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

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

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

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.