Playground Quotes

“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

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”
― 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 was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution. Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.”
― 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

“We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Sow the wind and reap the maelstrom.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“No, man. You know what the flight attendants say. ‘Put your own mask on before assisting others.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game...in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty." He stopped and twisted to face me. "Know what I'm sayin'?”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they'll have passed the real Turing test. (155)”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“In her rising tide of panic, Evie could not understand how her husband remained so weirdly reconciled. He never once voiced regrets or spoke of goals unsatisfied. Once, he said, “Wouldn’t it be something, to see what Danny’s children are going to be like?” He surprised her, waking from an afternoon nap and asking, “What do you suppose Dora will end up doing?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Now, that’s something I’m sorry I won’t see!” Other than that, he was packed and ready.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending. Blocked, she reread what she had written so many times it made her ill.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The next day this impossible feeling would begin to seem ordinary.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“That atheism freed up his Sunday mornings and added four more hours to his usable time, leaving him, by his own estimates, almost nine percent more productive every week than if he had been saddled with belief.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters, When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits, when he balanced the foundations of the earth, I was with him forming all things, and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; Playing in the world. . . . and my delights were to be with the children of men.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. Neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out. . . . When he prepared the heavens, I was present. When with a certain law and compass he enclosed the depths,”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“THERE WILL BE ONE MORE REFERENDUM. After the new hospital and new school, after the pinnacles are filed down and filled with fertile soil, after the houses both innovative and traditional, after a few solar cars and wind-powered boats, after the enriched communal gardens and restored forests, with ninety-nine percent of the bequest still left over, the island will vote to become again what they have always been—a people of the ocean. For every island is a canoe, and all the Earth is an island, living by the grace of the immense and slowly turning blue creature. This time the vote will be unanimous, and it will be heard around the world.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“What does it look like? Call it what it is. Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation. Everything alive, even we newcomers. . . . What are all creatures—even me—doing at all times but playing in the world, playing before their tinkering Lord?”
― Richard Powers, Playground