Top 300 Richard Powers Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Richard Powers

303. “Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.”

— Richard Powers

304. “What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way.”

— Richard Powers

305. “We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.”

— Richard Powers

306. “A hunter’s moon pulled at the willing water, crashing it against the edge of the continent, and the pulse of that liquid piston was better than any song.”

— Richard Powers

307. “The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.”

— Richard Powers

308. “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”

— Richard Powers

309. “There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.”

— Richard Powers

310. “Thank you,” she says, following the ancient formula. “For all these gifts that you have given.” And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know how hard it is for you to grow back.”

— Richard Powers

311. “All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember.”

— Richard Powers

312. “The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.”

— Richard Powers

313. “If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”

— Richard Powers

314. “I’d missed something obvious in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

316. “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

317. “Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.”

— Richard Powers

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

— Richard Powers

319. “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

320. “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

321. “He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, “I’m sorry.” No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here’s the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can’t see them, even when he can’t get near, even when he can’t remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.”

— Richard Powers

322. “On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they’d given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It’s not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world’s. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

— Richard Powers

323. “Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.”

— Richard Powers

324. “They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.”

— Richard Powers

325. “Curiosity was the core inner value of all the strongest players.”

— Richard Powers

326. “The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.”

— Richard Powers

327. “But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow.”

— Richard Powers

328. “The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That’s as big a truth as we Earthling have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.”

— Richard Powers

329. “The ocean was forever unfolding, forever exploring, forever tinkering with form, and every part of it was busy talking about what was all around. So was she. So was every being that came from those waters. Which meant every living thing.”

— Richard Powers

330. “How would we ever know aliens? We can’t even know birds.”

— Richard Powers

331. “The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.”

— Richard Powers

332. “Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.”

— Richard Powers

333. “Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it’s one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don’t even know that we are infected.”

— Richard Powers