Richard Powers Quotes & Sayings

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old... — Richard Powers

Creation is much in need of ordering. — Richard Powers

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

Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours. — Richard Powers

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

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

We are made for art ... The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment. — Richard Powers

zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten. — Richard Powers

On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. (24) — Richard Powers

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

Every boy carries a variation on hanging himself in the backyard branches in the rain. At least the one I saw did. I love nobody. I feel I am on the verge of loving everybody. Then I step outside my room. And he is waiting there. — Richard Powers

I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work. — Richard Powers

Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight's desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations. — Richard Powers

The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest. — Richard Powers

She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. Story strips its reader, holding her in a place time can't reach. A book's power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions. — Richard Powers

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

I remain one of those unreformable suckers who want to hear, just hear from time to time, even if the point of hearing has long since disappeared. — Richard Powers

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race. — Richard Powers

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

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. — Richard Powers

Written music is like nothing in the world - an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it's almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section. — Richard Powers

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

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess. — Richard Powers

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated? — Richard Powers

It was like so, but wasn't. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets - tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them. — Richard Powers

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

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

Do you run away or toward? — Richard Powers

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

But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone — Richard Powers

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year. — Richard Powers

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

Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. — Richard Powers

Music wasn't about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste. — Richard Powers

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? — Richard Powers

What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump? — Richard Powers

Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder. — Richard Powers

I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.
I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness's tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.
The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.
Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d'acqua. I'm eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water. — Richard Powers

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet. — Richard Powers

The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival — Richard Powers

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

The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is a nightmare beyond measure. — Richard Powers

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness. — Richard Powers

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

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear. — Richard Powers

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone. — Richard Powers

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

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. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with. — Richard Powers

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything. — Richard Powers

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

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. — Richard Powers

All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God. A — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace. — Richard Powers

Time didn't age you; memory did. — Richard Powers

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. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean? — Richard Powers

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

Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss. — Richard Powers

Everything interests me. — Richard Powers

I happen to believe that the deepest value of fiction is that, in its very fictiveness, it is the one arena where we can, at least temporarily, take apart and refuse to compete within the terms that the rest of existence insists on. Market value may come to drive out all other human values, except, perhaps, in the country of invented currency, the completely barter-driven economy of the imagination. Fiction, when it remembers its innate priority over other human transactions, can deal not in price but in worth. And that seems to me an act filled with political potential, as well as with pleasure. — Richard Powers

We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore. — Richard Powers

A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public. — Richard Powers

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

Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time's end and recollect the dead as if they're all still her. Because they are. — Richard Powers

For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate. — Richard Powers

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

She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

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

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am? — Richard Powers

Reading is the last act of secular prayer. — Richard Powers

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it. — Richard Powers

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

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

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

He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he'll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you've loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment. — Richard Powers

Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things. — Richard Powers

Zag when they think you'll zig. — Richard Powers

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. — Richard Powers

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously. — Richard Powers

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

Life is nothing but mutual infection. — Richard Powers

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

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block. — Richard Powers

Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els's damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends. — Richard Powers

I like to travel and connect. — Richard Powers