Richard Powers

“The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival”

“Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.”

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

“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.”

“Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.”

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

“A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.”

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

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

“Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.”

“We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.”

“All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.”

“She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.”

“I like to travel and connect.”

“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.”