Richard Powers Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Librarian is a service occupation, gas station attendant of the mind. In an earlier age, I might have made things. Now I only make things available.

Richard Powers
Each thing is what it is only through everything else.

Richard Powers
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

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

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

Richard Powers
What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts ot the same thing, was not the accumulations of Gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. the purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.

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

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
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.

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

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

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
Art is the most terrifying of human inventions — it preserves the right to undermine all categories.

Richard Powers