Richard Powers Quotes

Quotes about:

• What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

  Richard Powers

  States, Equal, Sentences

  46 Copy quote

• Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

  Richard Powers

  Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

  18 Copy quote

• Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

  Richard Powers

  Forever, Mastery, Faces

  9 Copy quote

• When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

  Richard Powers

  Looks, Harder

  Richard Powers (2010). “Generosity”, p.8, Atlantic Books Ltd

  21 Copy quote

• I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

  Richard Powers

  Mind, Arguing, Bother

  4 Copy quote

• Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

  Richard Powers

  Prayer, Reading, Lasts

  9 Copy quote

• We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

  Richard Powers

  Roles, World, Way

  4 Copy quote

• Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

  Richard Powers

  Waiting, World, Stills

  Richard Powers (2014). “Orfeo”, p.47, Atlantic Books Ltd

  5 Copy quote

• I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

  Richard Powers

  Flower, Writing, Design

  7 Copy quote

• I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

  Richard Powers

  Technology, Thinking, Novelists

  4 Copy quote

• Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

  Richard Powers

  Mother, Children, Spring

  Richard Powers (2009). “Generosity: An Enhancement”, p.166, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

  Richard Powers

  Use, Body, Music Is

  Richard Powers (2004). “The Time of Our Singing: A Novel”, p.536, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

  Richard Powers

  Long, Viruses, Bugs

  Richard Powers (2010). “Generosity”, p.126, Atlantic Books Ltd

  5 Copy quote

• Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

  Richard Powers

  Self, Evil, Refusal

  4 Copy quote

• The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

  Richard Powers

  Reading, Writing, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

  Richard Powers

  Hands, Lays

  Richard Powers (2004). “Galatea 2.2: A Novel”, p.103, Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

• This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

  Richard Powers

  Book, Character, Expression

  5 Copy quote

• The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

  Richard Powers

  Realizing, Disorientation, Status Quo

  5 Copy quote

• Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

  Richard Powers

  Fall, Past, Simple

  Richard Powers (2014). “Orfeo”, p.25, Atlantic Books Ltd

  4 Copy quote

• We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

  Richard Powers

  Self, Racism, Senses

  "Magic Powers" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. March 14, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

• I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

  Richard Powers

  Reading, Past, Years

  5 Copy quote

• The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

  Richard Powers

  Ideas, Imagination, Desire

  5 Copy quote

• I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

  Richard Powers

  Who I Am, Occupation, Rewards

  7 Copy quote

• My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

  Richard Powers

  Dream, Lying, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

  Richard Powers

  Principles, Composition, Repeats

  Richard Powers (2014). “Orfeo”, p.65, Atlantic Books Ltd

  4 Copy quote

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