Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.”

— Richard Powers

102. “She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.”

— Richard Powers

103. “For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body’s most private moments, something else joins in.”

— Richard Powers

104. “The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease...”

— Richard Powers

105. “The understory fills up with tracks like longhand accusations scribbled on the snow.”

— Richard Powers

106. “She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.”

— Richard Powers

107. “A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.”

— Richard Powers

108. “Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.”

— Richard Powers

109. “Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that’s for another trial.”

— Richard Powers

110. “She runs the entire meal down the garbage disposal and goes hungry, a hunger more wonderful than any meal.”

— Richard Powers

111. “Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.”

— Richard Powers

112. “Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning. Humankind is utterly wrong about the neighbors, and no one can see it. We must repay the world for every idea, every thing we have ever stolen.”

— Richard Powers

113. “He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.”

— Richard Powers

114. “Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.”

— Richard Powers

115. “It was like so, but wasn’t.”

— Richard Powers

116. “Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.”

— Richard Powers

117. “Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.”

— Richard Powers

118. “It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant’s, the planet’s, brain.”

— Richard Powers

119. “Listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.”

— Richard Powers

120. “How reason is just another weapon of control.”

— Richard Powers

121. “In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.”

— Richard Powers

122. “This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.”

— Richard Powers

123. “If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.”

— Richard Powers

124. “What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?”

— Richard Powers

125. “We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.”

— Richard Powers

126. “A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel – root and stem – in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.”

— Richard Powers

127. “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.”

— Richard Powers

128. “She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.”

— Richard Powers

129. “Girls doing science are like bears riding bikes. Possible, but freakish.”

— Richard Powers

130. “The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.”

— Richard Powers

131. “Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.”

— Richard Powers

132. “All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.”

— Richard Powers

133. “We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

— Richard Powers

134. “Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail.”

— Richard Powers

135. “Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.”

— Richard Powers

136. “It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I’d already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.”

— Richard Powers

137. “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.”

— Richard Powers

138. “But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

— Richard Powers

139. “The polite applause of aspens.”

— Richard Powers

140. “CHRISTMAS EVE: There’s a fire blazing in the fireplace, food enough for five thousand, and a new TV as big as Wyoming tuned to a football game no one cares about.”

— Richard Powers

141. “A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.”

— Richard Powers

142. “We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You’ll see me again. But you’ll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.”

— Richard Powers

143. “Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status.”

— Richard Powers

144. “People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that.” Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”

— Richard Powers

145. “It’s a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.”

— Richard Powers

146. “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

148. “A country watches dumbstruck as New England’s priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food – the most harvested tree in the country – is vanishing.”

— Richard Powers

149. “In 25 years of writing novels, I’ve never had anything that felt like writer’s block.”

— Richard Powers

150. “Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.”

— Richard Powers