344 Quotes by Richard Powers

If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!

Maybe they’re not scared of different. Maybe they’re scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

What’s wrong with How Trees Will Save the World? Trees won’t save the world?” “I’m sure they will. After the world shrugs us off.

If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity...

I wasn’t the genre I’d thought I was.

Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together.

So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. One family of distress hormones used by her trees – jasmonate – supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue. Sniff me, love me, I’m in trouble. And they are in trouble, all these trees.

You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.