Richard Torres

“We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society. It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions, that offer that say in equal measure to every citizen, that allow some kind of access to your deliberations or at least provide a meaningful feedback mechanism to tell you it isn’t working. It is not reimagining the world at conferences.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory