White Falcon

“wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Trouble is what creates intelligence? I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval. His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment