Quotes by Richard Powers

He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas Id already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

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

Creation is much in need of ordering.

Wed drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. Youre hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasnt the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speechs stockhouse except what they mean?

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

Chance was just an order that you hadnt yet perceived.

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.

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.

“... mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planets surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35.786 km upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high.”