Jean > Jean's Quotes

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the world "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour. Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“A hunter’s moon pulled at the willing water, crashing it against the edge of the continent, and the pulse of that liquid piston was better than any song.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.” I doubled down on my belief that computer scientists should never dabble in philosophy. “What does that mean, exactly?” “What makes you happy, Todd Keane? What’s your work? How do you define a day well spent?”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn't care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The ocean was forever unfolding, forever exploring, forever tinkering with form, and every part of it was busy talking about what was all around. So was she. So was every being that came from those waters. Which meant every living thing.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Curiosity was the core inner value of all the strongest players.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.”
― Richard Powers, Playground