344 Quotes by Richard Powers

The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.

Life is nothing but mutual infection.

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.

There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.(page 330)

A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.

She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body's provinces across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul's innermost national park.

Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest.

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

Was tonality out there – God-given? Or were those magic ratios, like everything human, makeshift rules to be broken on the way to a more merciless freedom?