344 Quotes by Richard Powers

I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part – the mind, perhaps.

We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.

We made this! It’s so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team’s list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim’s body could begin to guess.

She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

The polite applause of aspens.

A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone – choose your schizophrenia.

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.