Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Do not invent anything; simply discover it.”

— Richard Powers

202. “The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There’s no other explanation: almost all the tree’s mass has come from the very air.”

— Richard Powers

203. “Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder.”

— Richard Powers

204. “Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.”

— Richard Powers

205. “When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don’t belong to you anyway. It’s not yours to hide.”

— Richard Powers

206. “Life became an interruption of my description of it.”

— Richard Powers

207. “We’d drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.”

— Richard Powers

208. “Crazy is a species under no threat at all.”

— Richard Powers

209. “I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared.”

— Richard Powers

210. “If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”

— Richard Powers

211. “Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.”

— Richard Powers

212. “Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets – tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.”

— Richard Powers

213. “All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space.”

— Richard Powers

214. “Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It’s a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.”

— Richard Powers

215. “But hope and truth do nothing for humans without use. In the clumpy, clumsy fingerpaint of words, she searches for the use of Old Tjikko, up on that barren crest, endlessly dying and resurrecting in every change of climate. His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we to trees?”

— Richard Powers

216. “Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.”

— Richard Powers

217. “Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.”

— Richard Powers

218. “Trouble is what creates intelligence? I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval. His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.”

— Richard Powers

219. “Lenny breaks her elbow, by accident. In self-defense, he keeps telling anyone who’ll listen. That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.”

— Richard Powers

220. “Smart enough to see that you’re a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that’s going to give out in – what? Another few thousand sunrises?”

— Richard Powers

221. “The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.”

— Richard Powers

222. “Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm – threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.”

— Richard Powers

223. “She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. 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

224. “Such a small difference, between forever and once.”

— Richard Powers

225. “The bookcases are full of previous resolutions, taken up and shelved. No-Sweat Indian Cooking. A Hundred Hikes in the Greater Yellowstone. A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds. To Eastern Wildflowers. Off the Beaten Path in Europe. Unknown Thailand. Manuals of beer brewing and wine making. Untouched foreign language texts. All those scattered explorations theirs to sample and squander. They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.”

— Richard Powers

226. “What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder. And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they’re seeing.”

— Richard Powers

227. “Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?”

— Richard Powers

228. “This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.”

— Richard Powers

229. “We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.”

— Richard Powers

230. “He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere.”

— Richard Powers

231. “There’s a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked. Aliens land on Earth. They operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans. He can’t remember how the story ends. It doesn’t matter. Every branch’s tip has its own new bud.”

— Richard Powers

232. “I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.”

— Richard Powers

233. “Long answers need long time. And long time is exactly what’s vanishing.”

— Richard Powers

234. “The ‘information novel’ shouldn’t be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.”

— Richard Powers

235. “And yet, places remember what people forget.”

— Richard Powers

236. “We don’t consider the roles that we’re taking in making the world the way it is.”

— Richard Powers

237. “So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered. One family of distress hormones used by her trees – jasmonate – supplies the punch to all those feminine perfumes that play on mystery and intrigue. Sniff me, love me, I’m in trouble. And they are in trouble, all these trees.”

— Richard Powers

238. “What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

— Richard Powers

239. “Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.”

— Richard Powers

240. “She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats.”

— Richard Powers

241. “That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.”

— Richard Powers

242. “English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.”

— Richard Powers

243. “Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.”

— Richard Powers

244. “She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.”

— Richard Powers

245. “Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths.”

— Richard Powers

246. “A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public.”

— Richard Powers

247. “Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.”

— Richard Powers

248. “You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.”

— Richard Powers

249. “What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”

— Richard Powers

250. “She’s an animal, a mere avatar. The other woman, too – stuff-imprisoned spirit, deluded into thinking it’s autonomous. And yet conjoined, linked to each other, a pair of local gods who have lived and felt all things.”

— Richard Powers