Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Can you feel it lift and disappear? That standing wave of constant static. The distraction so ubiquitous you never even knew you were wrapped in it. Human certainty. The thing that blinds you to what’s right here – gone. He can – can feel it.”

— Richard Powers

252. “Maybe they’re not scared of different. Maybe they’re scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?”

— Richard Powers

253. “There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.”

— Richard Powers

254. “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.”

— Richard Powers

255. “There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.”

— Richard Powers

256. “And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.”

— Richard Powers

257. “Can you feel it lift and disappear? That standing wave of constant static. The distraction so ubiquitous you never even knew you were wrapped in it. Human certainty.”

— Richard Powers

258. “That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.”

— Richard Powers

259. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

— Richard Powers

260. “The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.”

— Richard Powers

261. “No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.”

— Richard Powers

262. “Smartphones are miracles, and they’ve turned us into gods. But in one simple respect, they’re primitive: you can’t slam down the receiver.”

— Richard Powers

263. “We are not... wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.”

— Richard Powers

264. “The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.”

— Richard Powers

265. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”

— Richard Powers

266. “I wasn’t the genre I’d thought I was.”

— Richard Powers

267. “He can’t remember when the Web wasn’t here. That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.”

— Richard Powers

268. “But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them.”

— Richard Powers

269. “They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.”

— Richard Powers

270. “Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els’s damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: 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

271. “Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.”

— Richard Powers

272. “Then he woke up from the dream of humankind.”

— Richard Powers

273. “She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.”

— Richard Powers

274. “Someday we’ll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.”

— Richard Powers

275. “The moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees.”

— Richard Powers

276. “Life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”

— Richard Powers

277. “Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.”

— Richard Powers

278. “The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment.”

— Richard Powers

279. “Oddly enough, there’s no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.”

— Richard Powers

280. “Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.”

— Richard Powers

281. “All that’s left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might ever want.”

— Richard Powers

282. “First there was nothing. Then there was everything. Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.”

— Richard Powers

283. “But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.”

— Richard Powers

284. “This is her freedom. This one. The freedom to be equal to the terrors of the day.”

— Richard Powers

285. “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”

— Richard Powers

286. “How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.”

— Richard Powers

287. “There was a planet that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.”

— Richard Powers

288. “Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.”

— Richard Powers

289. “And what do all good stories do? They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”

— Richard Powers

290. “That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. Maybe it’s different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.”

— Richard Powers

291. “Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good – as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil – the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.”

— Richard Powers

292. “Life is something we need to stop correcting.”

— Richard Powers

293. “The wrong people have all the rights.”

— Richard Powers

294. “They wouldn’t know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.”

— Richard Powers

295. “The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether.”

— Richard Powers

296. “People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own.”

— Richard Powers

297. “He has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers. One that refuses the judgment of the world and all its blindness. One that tells her to hold still, take his gift, and go on living.”

— Richard Powers

298. “The massively parallel online experience will go on, faithful to the tyranny of the place it pretends to escape.”

— Richard Powers

299. “The world had become something no schoolchild should be allowed to discover.”

— Richard Powers

300. “It’s a rare week when we dead-to-be don’t surrender a few more minutes of our souls to the overflowing archives.”

— Richard Powers