Best 59 quotes of Richard Powers on MyQuotes

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

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

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

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.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

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.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

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.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

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.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

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.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

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

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

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.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

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.

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren't plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.

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.

Creation is much in need of ordering.

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

High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.

Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

In fact, it's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they'll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

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.

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.

It seemed to me that half of life’s problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.

Of course I'm ill, I'm alive aren't I?

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.