Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone.”

— Richard Powers

152. “Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.”

— Richard Powers

153. “What?” he asks the tree. “What? ” The tree feels no need to reply.”

— Richard Powers

154. “She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future’s breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She’d read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.”

— Richard Powers

155. “In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.”

— Richard Powers

156. “There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.”

— Richard Powers

157. “The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival.”

— Richard Powers

158. “Now they need only learn what life wants from humans.”

— Richard Powers

159. “For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

161. “Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.”

— Richard Powers

162. “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.”

— Richard Powers

163. “Written music is like nothing in the world – an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.”

— Richard Powers

164. “She becomes her father’s star and only pupil for the simple reason that she alone, of all the family, sees what he knows: plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.”

— Richard Powers

165. “Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.”

— Richard Powers

166. “The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.”

— Richard Powers

167. “Dad, I would very much like to plunge off the edge of commonsense existence, at your expense, and become certifiably unemployable.”

— Richard Powers

168. “There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plan a tree? Twenty years ago.”

— Richard Powers

169. “I think that if the novel’s task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life – technology and science.”

— Richard Powers

170. “I keep a quotes journal – of every sentence that I’ve wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.”

— Richard Powers

171. “The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is a nightmare beyond measure.”

— Richard Powers

172. “Time didn’t age you; memory did.”

— Richard Powers

173. “We made this! It’s so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team’s list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim’s body could begin to guess.”

— Richard Powers

174. “I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.”

— Richard Powers

175. “Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.”

— Richard Powers

176. “She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.”

— Richard Powers

177. “Trees give it all away, don’t they?”

— Richard Powers

178. “How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.”

— Richard Powers

179. “There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?”

— Richard Powers

180. “The trees have vanished and the town forgets. But not the land.”

— Richard Powers

181. “And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.”

— Richard Powers

182. “Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight’s desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations.”

— Richard Powers

183. “But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.”

— Richard Powers

184. “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.”

— Richard Powers

185. “She knows she’ll never see him again in this or any life to come. Yet she sees him wherever she looks. That’s life; the dead keep the living alive.”

— Richard Powers

186. “I don’t know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.”

— Richard Powers

187. “The law is simply human will, written down.”

— Richard Powers

188. “She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down.”

— Richard Powers

189. “Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”

— Richard Powers

190. “I’d like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I’m doing. That’s one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.”

— Richard Powers

191. “A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices or cell phone – choose your schizophrenia.”

— Richard Powers

192. “What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.”

— Richard Powers

193. “The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it’s not corrupted.”

— Richard Powers

194. “All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.”

— Richard Powers

195. “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

196. “Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.”

— Richard Powers

197. “The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we’re disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.”

— Richard Powers

198. “Chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived.”

— Richard Powers

199. “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.”

— Richard Powers

200. “He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions. Now she wonders if he might have died, once, too.”

— Richard Powers