344 Quotes by Richard Powers

And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

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...

It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

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

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

How reason is just another weapon of control.

Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.