Richard Powers famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#States #Equal #Sentences
Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
-- Richard Powers

#Book #Reading #Thought Provoking
I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.
-- Richard Powers

#Bigs #Big Picture
Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.
-- Richard Powers

#Self #Evil #Refusal
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

#Long #Bugs #Viruses
Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narratorâ€™s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, hereâ€™s spring.
-- Richard Powers

#Mother #Children #Spring
When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.
-- Richard Powers

#Looks #Harder
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

#Forever #Mastery #Faces
Reading is the last act of secular prayer.
-- Richard Powers

#Prayer #Reading #Lasts
I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.
-- Richard Powers

#Mind #Arguing #Bother
We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.
-- Richard Powers

#Roles #World #Way
The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.
-- Richard Powers

#Use #Body #Music Is
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

#Flower #Writing #Design
Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
-- Richard Powers

#Waiting #World #Stills
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

#Technology #Thinking #Novelists
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

#Book #Character #Expression
All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.
-- Richard Powers

#Hands #Lays
The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.
-- Richard Powers

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

#Reading #Past #Years
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

#Ideas #Imagination #Desire
The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.
-- Richard Powers

#Reading #Writing #Eye
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

#Self #Racism #Senses
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

#Fall #Past #Simple
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

#Years #Three #Why Not
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

#Who I Am #Occupation #Rewards
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

#Book #Fascination #Littles

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