Gain Quotes

“The instant camera lies forgotten in a drawer by the side of a hospital bed. Its pictures, too, began in sun: day’s finger painting, where every product starts. A girl sowing a garden. The Million Dollar Movers Club, dropping by with chocolate and flowers. A woman blowing out the candles on a cake, the IV just visible beneath the sleeve of her robe. A nurse’s aide throws it out, prior to the next occupant. For the entire engineering magnificence was designed to be pitched. Labor, materials, assembly, shipping, sales markups and overheads, insurance, international tariffs—the whole prodigious creation costs less than ten dollars. The world sells to us at a loss, until we learn to afford it. Such a wonder has to be cheap enough to jettison. You cannot have a single-use camera except at a repeatable price. Buy it; shoot it; toss it. As mundane as any breakthrough that seemed our whole salvation once. A disposable miracle, no less than the least of us.”
― Richard Powers, Gain

“Laura stops. She stares at the flesh of her flesh, this chameleon. Ellen? Who planted that tirade in her? It must be the time of life. At seventeen, cheerleaders can turn Trotskyite somewhere between fourth and fifth period.”
― Richard Powers, Gain

“A war club more elaborate than a railroad locomotive, taking more time to make: it begged the same question that his whiff of scentlessness had. What, in the final face of things, was the use of use?”
― Richard Powers, Gain