Quotes by Richard Powers - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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Everything interests me.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Me Everything
Interests
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I like to travel and connect.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Connect
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The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Midwest
Tabula Rasa
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Reading is the last act of secular prayer.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Lasts
Prayer
Reading
Secular
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Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Evil
Refusal
Self
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Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Men
Luxury
Race
White Man
Ignoring
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Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Code
Lines
Type
Organism
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The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Composition
Principles
Repeats
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When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Harder
Looks
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Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Stills
Waiting
World
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The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Body
Music Is
Use
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Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Book
Reading
Thought Provoking
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I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Arguing
Bother
Mind
Myself Mind Me
Bothers
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Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Fit
Suitcases
Two
Owned
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All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Hands
Lays
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We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Roles
Way
World
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In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Block
Writing
Years
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The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Curiosity
Information
Mainstream
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What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Equal
Sentences
States
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The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Loneliness
Stranger
Writing
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The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Disorientation
Realizing
Status Quo
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Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Computer
Grad
Grad School
School
Coding
Tech
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I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Big Picture
Bigs
Seems
Connects
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My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Technology
Goal
Invisible
Mediation
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I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Journal
Past
Reading
Years
Quotes
Sentence
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The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Eye
Market Economy
Reading
Writing
Corrupted
Suspect
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Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Vicariously
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I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Age
Digital
Digital Age
Hours
Impossible
Time Work Age
Work Time Age
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All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Brain
Different
Different Ways
World
Depend
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What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Determine
Tends
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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 / Novelist
Dream
Bed
Closest
Horizontal
Lying
Writing
Space Myself Always
Suspend
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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 / Novelist
Belonging
Racism
Self
Senses
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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 / Novelist
Bugs
Long
Viruses
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For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Awful
Candy
Closing
Doors
Possibility
Shops
University
Door
Possibilities
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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 / Novelist
Occupation
Rewards
Who I Am
Time Great I Am
Each Time
Reinvent
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I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Book
Components
Fascination
Flip
Littles
Systems
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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 / Novelist
Design
Dullness
Flower
Writing
Arrange
Works
Flowers
Constraint
Each One
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The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Jobs
Creativity
Insane
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If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?
Richard Powers / Novelist
Three
Why Not
Years
Alien
Chunk
Project
Immerse
Stake
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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 / Novelist
Imagination
Desire
Driven
Human Thought
Ideas
Suspicion
Bodies
Cobbled
Sensibilities
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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 / Novelist
Technology
Contemporary
Contemporary Life
Novelists
Thinking
Central
Life Science Good
Describe
Hard Look
Task
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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 / Novelist
Binary
Book
Character
Expression
Intense
Emotions
False
Hold
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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 / Novelist
Cultivating
Faces
Forever
Grows
Mastery
Perpetual
Reverence
Theory
Wonder
Control
Condition
Latest
Richer
Step
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We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Dream
Capable
Extensions
Build
Addressing
Anxieties
Desires
Passions
Prosthetic
Reflects
Technologies
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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 / Novelist
Fall
Past
Simple
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A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.
Richard Powers / Novelist
Activity
Human Activity
Retreat
Silence
Silent
Unfolding
Considered
Time Nothing Your
Moratorium
Pathological
Voices
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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 / Novelist
Vacation
Children
Mother
Spring
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