Top 100 Richard Powers Quotes

#1. Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #5569
#2. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #40787
#3. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #86253
#4. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #123583
#5. It seemed to me that half of life's problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #133325
#6. All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #167946
#7. All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #184492
#8. My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #197677
#9. Je ne fais aucun mal en restant ici.
I do no harm by remaining here.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #201954
#10. Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #230023
#11. Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #231410
#12. He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #261509
#13. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #293150
#14. Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #370744
#15. zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #393778
#16. The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #399917
#17. All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #404324
#18. Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #426839
#19. The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #429543
#20. Do you run away or toward?

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #471116
#21. But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #506394
#22. Creation is much in need of ordering.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #548174
#23. In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #554158
#24. Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #574354
#25. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #604067
#26. Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #622404
#27. It was like so, but wasn't.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #655604
#28. We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #691967
#29. How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #711132
#30. The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #723220
#31. Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #796378
#32. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #809198
#33. We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #827035
#34. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #829316
#35. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #843929
#36. Isn't the point of music to move listeners?"
Mattison smiled. "No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits."
"And tradition?"
"Real composers make their own.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #852102
#37. Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #854724
#38. Life is nothing but mutual infection.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #868812
#39. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #874859
#40. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #885159
#41. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #925782
#42. There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #951169
#43. The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #975146
#44. Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #987768
#45. I like to travel and connect.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #988864
#46. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1041136
#47. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1062346
#48. Everything interests me.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1077922
#49. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1082414
#50. There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1084134
#51. The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1105273
#52. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1110704
#53. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1124342
#54. Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1160371
#55. I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1167472
#56. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1204934
#57. In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1224431
#58. Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you'll zag. Creation's Rule Number Two.
What's Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul's straight man.
Zag when they think you'll zig.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1227097
#59. I wasn't the genre I'd thought I was.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1263941
#60. Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1273309
#61. Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1273856
#62. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1281789
#63. I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1292056
#64. Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1297237
#65. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1306919
#66. Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.
But then, maybe acclaim is the foyer to death.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1312944
#67. She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1316340
#68. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1323589
#69. The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1414089
#70. Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1453057
#71. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1466030
#72. Zag when they think you'll zig.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1491955
#73. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1497695
#74. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1500322
#75. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1506298
#76. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1533980
#77. What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump?

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1562939
#78. The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1576237
#79. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1580689
#80. Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1586186
#81. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1587220
#82. Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1622060
#83. The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1627021
#84. Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1639195
#85. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1680814
#86. There's joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you're equal to it.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1699824
#87. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1717770
#88. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1730139
#89. Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1734705
#90. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1735204
#91. Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1758180
#92. Time didn't age you; memory did.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1776862
#93. When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1780513
#94. I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1793325
#95. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1806993
#96. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1820293
#97. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1839699
#98. 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

Richard Powers Quotes #1854928
#99. Art is not a mobocracy. It's a republic.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1854997
#100. Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers Quotes #1860884

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