344 Quotes by Richard Powers

The Greeks had a word, xenia – guest friendship – a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God.

I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

If you’re going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els’s damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that’s for another trial.

Time didn’t age you; memory did.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing – nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

What?” he asks the tree. “What? ” The tree feels no need to reply.