344 Quotes by Richard Powers

Love for trees pours out of her – the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.

Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.

People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries.

This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the world “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. And with those words, she has her book’s end.