The Overstory: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

by Richard Powers

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

The blackest despair at the heart of them gets pressed to diamond.

A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”

“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’” The Chinese engineer smiles. “Good one.” “‘When is the next best time? Now.’”

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim.

“Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.” “Yep. And you always said the next best time was now.” “Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.”

She wants only peace. But this is where she must live now: In the shadow of the bent mulberry. The inexplicable poem. The fisherman’s song.

One by one, they’ve drifted out of the neighborhood of green things into the louder, flashier party of other people.

A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

They say the opposite of what they mean, to test if you can see through them. Which they want. Then resent when you do.

But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

“Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.”

He wants only to forgive the world, forget, and fall.

A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

The seed his father plants in him will eat the world.

redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize—the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.

“Ah, buy me a hillside that slopes away from town.”

But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

HIGH SCHOOL tries to kill her.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men …. In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

On the threshold of a contented middle age, this ambush.

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground.

The most wondrous things alive need you.

Cold is good for you. People keep themselves way too warm.”

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.

When her eyes open again, truths rush into her head. Like Enlightenment, but without the glow.

there comes a moment, as there always does in the game itself, when you must turn your pretty backwater sector of the universe into a revenue stream.

That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.

A tree from back at the beginning of trees.

The woods are calling, and she must go.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?”

Don’t stand out; you have no right. No one owes you a thing. Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense. Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does might matter.

She has always been allergic to people with conviction.

“Time’s winged chariot.”

As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

“It could be the eternal project of mankind, to learn what forests have figured out.”

And who could stay on the ground, once he has seen life in the canopy?

They lock eyes for the tiniest forever.

Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon.

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.