Jacey

“There it is: the ultimate commandment. Take care of your own. Protect your genes. Lay down your life for one child, two siblings, or eight first cousins. How many friends would that translate to? How many strangers who might still be out there, laying down their lives for other species? How many trees? He can't begin to tell his wife the worst of it. Since his arrest—since beginning to think objectively again, after so many years of treating the question as an abstraction—he has begun to see that the dead woman was right: the world is full of welfares that must come even before your own kind.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Maybe it's okay. Maybe mass extinction justifies a little fuzziness. Maybe earnestness can help his hurt species as much as anything. Who is he to say?”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What's crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“He tried to remind her: Something between them has yet to happen. A reason why they must stay together. He has seen it already, a premonition that has kept him going, all these months of holding still. Some purpose to their union that already always existed. They belong.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory