Richard Powers

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

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

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

You can’t come back to something that is gone.

People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing

What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

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

We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.