Richard Powers Quotes

I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

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.

~ Richard Powers

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

~ Richard Powers

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

~ Richard Powers

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

~ Richard Powers

The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.

~ Richard Powers

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

~ Richard Powers

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

~ 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

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

Creation is much in need of ordering.

~ Richard Powers

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

~ 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

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

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

~ Richard Powers

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.

~ 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