The Overstory

by Richard Powers

all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.

There’s something wrong with regular people. They’re far from being the best creatures in the world.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

nobody’s anger can hurt a girl who has already died.

memories waiting to become predictions.

The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified.

Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together.

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

the authority of people is bankrupt.”

But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one,

Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.

word tree and the word truth come from the same root.