Richard Powers Quotes

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

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

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.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

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

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

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.

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.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.