344 Quotes by Richard Powers

I keep a quotes journal – of every sentence that I’ve wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

Trees give it all away, don’t they?

Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.

Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets – tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.

The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is a nightmare beyond measure.

Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.

She loves her own species, too – sneaky and self-serving, trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it – yet chosen by creation to know.

Lenny breaks her elbow, by accident. In self-defense, he keeps telling anyone who’ll listen. That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.