344 Quotes by Richard Powers

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.' "The Chinese engineer smiles. "Good one."" 'When is the next best time? Now.' ""Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

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 Get three people in the room and they'll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

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

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

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.

They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.

You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to look at.

Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.