Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

— Richard Powers

2. “I like to travel and connect.”

— Richard Powers

3. “Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.”

— Richard Powers

4. “Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.”

— Richard Powers

5. “The Greeks had a word, xenia – guest friendship – a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God.”

— Richard Powers

6. “What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

— Richard Powers

7. “I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.”

— Richard Powers

8. “When you’re sure of what you’re looking at, look harder.”

— Richard Powers

9. “Evil is the refusal to see one’s self in others.”

— Richard Powers

10. “Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all.”

— Richard Powers

11. “Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.”

— Richard Powers

12. “The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.”

— Richard Powers

13. “Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.”

— Richard Powers

14. “Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss.”

— Richard Powers

15. “Reading is the last act of secular prayer.”

— Richard Powers

16. “Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”

— Richard Powers

17. “What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.”

— Richard Powers

18. “I don’t mind arguing with myself. It’s when I lose that it bothers me.”

— Richard Powers

19. “I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.”

— Richard Powers

20. “Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.”

— Richard Powers

21. “The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.”

— Richard Powers

22. “Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?”

— Richard Powers

23. “A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”

— Richard Powers

24. “If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah.”

— Richard Powers

25. “Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

27. “For there is hope of a tree, if it goes down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender branches will not cease. Though the root grows old in the earth, and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs. But man, man wastes away and dies and gives up the ghost, and where is he?”

— Richard Powers

28. “A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

30. “It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.”

— Richard Powers

31. “Scopophobia hits them all – fear of seeing and being seen. A dog will bite if you stare at it too hard. People will shoot you.”

— Richard Powers

32. “An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute.”

— Richard Powers

33. “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.”

— Richard Powers

34. “There’s joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you’re equal to it.”

— Richard Powers

35. “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.”

— Richard Powers

36. “The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing – nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.”

— Richard Powers

37. “Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.”

— Richard Powers

38. “Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

40. “The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

42. “Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”

— Richard Powers

43. “Don’t worry if your job is small and your rewards are few. Even the mighty Ironwood was once a nut, like you.”

— Richard Powers

44. “Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

46. “Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.”

— Richard Powers

47. “A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.”

— Richard Powers

48. “If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.”

— Richard Powers

49. “Plant-blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us.”

— Richard Powers

50. “Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.”

— Richard Powers