The Overstory Quotes

“There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.' "
The Chinese engineer smiles. "Good one."
" 'When is the next best time? Now.' "
"Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What is it worth to be looked at, without judgment, for as long as you need?”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering morphine. Chemicals rush down her windpipe, through the bloodstream to her body's provinces across the blood-brain barrier and into her thoughts. The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by side again, under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul's innermost national park.”
― Richard Powers

“Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers