Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

— Richard Powers

52. “You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.”

— Richard Powers

53. “Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.”

— Richard Powers

54. “A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.”

— Richard Powers

55. “There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”

— Richard Powers

56. “Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn’t destroyed yet.”

— Richard Powers

57. “You can’t come back to something that is gone.”

— Richard Powers

58. “There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”

— Richard Powers

59. “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”

— Richard Powers

60. “When the world was ending the first time, Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it’s a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!”

— Richard Powers

61. “It’s a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you’ve already made.”

— Richard Powers

62. “Here’s the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It’s a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It’s a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It’s the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.”

— Richard Powers

63. “Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.”

— Richard Powers

64. “What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”

— Richard Powers

65. “She loves her own species, too – sneaky and self-serving, trapped in blinkered bodies, blind to intelligence all around it – yet chosen by creation to know.”

— Richard Powers

66. “The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us” – those who are holding rights at the time.”

— Richard Powers

67. “To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

— Richard Powers

68. “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.”

— Richard Powers

69. “The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”

— Richard Powers

70. “If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.”

— Richard Powers

71. “The bird and the fish may fall in love but where will they build their nest?”

— Richard Powers

72. “Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.”

— Richard Powers

73. “We don’t make reality. We evade it. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”

— Richard Powers

74. “The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow – writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn’t know English could permit.”

— Richard Powers

75. “Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we’re near... when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you.”

— Richard Powers

76. “My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.”

— Richard Powers

77. “Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.”

— Richard Powers

78. “Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.”

— Richard Powers

79. “Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.”

— Richard Powers

80. “We’re shaped to think the things we want will make us happy. But shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting. Wanting is what having wants to recover.”

— Richard Powers

81. “Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.”

— Richard Powers

82. “Yesterday’s political criminals are on today’s postage stamps!”

— Richard Powers

83. “Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them.” The only question is whether they’ll talk again, before the end.”

— Richard Powers

84. “I never knew how strong a drug other people are.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

86. “There are girls, but they baffle him. They pretend to be stupid, by way of protective coloration. Passive, still, and cryptic. They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. Then resent when you do.”

— Richard Powers

87. “Character is all that matters in the end.” It’s a child’s creed, of course; just one small step up from the belief that the creator of the universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.”

— Richard Powers

88. “When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.”

— Richard Powers

89. “Everything interests me.”

— Richard Powers

90. “What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?”

— Richard Powers

91. “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.”

— Richard Powers

92. “If you’re going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?”

— Richard Powers

93. “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

94. “Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.”

— Richard Powers

95. “I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.”

— Richard Powers

96. “Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.”

— Richard Powers

97. “Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.”

— Richard Powers

98. “We have a Midas problem. There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.”

— Richard Powers

99. “The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.”

— Richard Powers

100. “It’s amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.”

— Richard Powers