Playground

by Richard Powers

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.

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.

A person who never felt sadness would never have been able to feel such pride.

He spoke like he was hungry to talk but wasn’t sure he had a right to. A plume of beautiful, improvised insights poured out of him, after which he hunkered down into his desk trying to disappear.

life would never again be so saturated in possibility.

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.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

‘Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.’ John Lennon.”

He was seeing me through a dark time. He’d chosen to keep an eye on me, as a brother does.

Now, even when her waywardness grabbed him by the throat, when her coming and going left him bereft, he knew he would never again think of letting go of the potato. Everything came from the potato. Without the potato, life would be far bleaker.

People are like sculptures. You can mold them a little when they start out, but not much. A body wants to be what a body wants to be.

What you call the ocean is nothing but the coast. You can go visit it for a long weekend. You can even live alongside it. But you never get much farther than a mile or two from the shore. Your ocean is just the continental shelf, a little bit of spill over the rim of the cup. “The real ocean . . . the deep one . . . the one that doesn’t end. . . .”

Find the moves that the rules forgot to outlaw.

It’s quite another to understand what passes for the feeling of injustice between two people who once loved each other.

For centuries, the island has always hung flowers around the necks of its destroyers.

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.