The Echo Maker Quotes

“On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Time didn't age you; memory did.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“To find the soul it is necessary to lose it. —A. R. Luria”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The whole race suffered from Capgras. those birds danced like our next of kin, called and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: Imposters. at most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Creatures, all of whome heard humans and knew them as just a part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge, for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“low, but only the image, the store. Only the play of likeness cut by chemical cascades, always undoing the state that did the storing. Semaphores at night, cobbling up even the cliff they signaled from. As he once wrote: Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile…”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“squaring the number of states they might inscribe. The link between them altered. The cells fired easier with each fire, their changing connections remembering a trace of the outside. A few dozen such cells slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that mapped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance. Some billions of years and hundreds of billions of neurons later, and these webbed cells wired up a grammar—a notion of nouns and verbs and even prepositions. Those recording synapses, bent back onto themselves—brain piggy-backing and reading itself as it read the world—exploded into hopes and dreams, memories more elaborate than the experience that chiseled them, theories of other minds, invented places as real and detailed as anything material, themselves matter, microscopic electro-etched worlds within the world, a shape for every shape out there, with infinite shapes left over: all dimensions springing from this thing the universe floats in. But never hot or cold, solid or soft, left or right, high or”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“How could he tell them? Energy fell on an ancient cell; the cell registered. Some prodding set off a chemical cascade that incised the cell and changed its structure, forming a cast of the signals that fell on it. Eons later, two cells clasped, signaling each other,”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Past thirty, she had no more time or pride to risk on ambition.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“For the hour it took to transact the forms, she felt the release of being useful. The pleasure of it burned.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“In the postage-stamp yard, the border collie reverted to herding things—squirrels, snow motes, fence posts—anything to convince the humans that she was still worthy of love.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The whole town suddenly struck her as a glorified I-80 exit ramp. Familiarity filled her with a weird, inappropriate calm. Home.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“She toyed with the date: 02/20/02. Did it mean anything?”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since before this river started.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“She quoted from The Country of Surprise: “Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“the country’s bean curve. Or else they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They’d become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber’s suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“September came, and then the attacks. Alongside the rest of the world, the trio hung on the endlessly looping, slow-motion, cinematic insanity. From the Central Plains, New York was a black plume on the farthest horizon. Troops were securing the Golden Gate Bridge. Anthrax started turning up in the nation’s sugar bowls. Then the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan. A broadcaster in Omaha declared, It’s payback time, and all along the river came stony, unanimous assent.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Holy jump up and sit down.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“A woman of her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can't use her? we're down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she's going to roll over and die?”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“(Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“(Culture) Some part of us could model some other modeler. and out of that simple loop came all the love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“(Memory) A few dozen cells, slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that shaped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker