The Time of Our Singing Quotes

“In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“καθετί τελευταίο διασώζεται σε κάτι επόμενο. Ακόμη και τα τελευταία πράγματα διαρκούν αιώνια.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“The bird and the fish may fall in love but where will they build their nest?”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Muziek dient ertoe ons eraan te herinneren dat we maar heel kort een lichaam hebben.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don’t belong to you anyway. It’s not yours to hide.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“The sunlight’s blaze doesn’t threaten the yellow of a flower. We only resent what we can still hope to be.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Do you know what time is?” His voice is so soft, I think I’m making it up. “Time is our way of keeping everything from happening at once.” I reply as he taught me, long ago, the year my voice broke. “You know what time is? Time is just one damn thing after another.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“NATION LEARNS LESSON IN TOLERANCE, the newsreels will say. But nations can’t learn lessons. Whatever tolerance graces this day will not survive the spring.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Her face was like her voice: best sampled from the middle of the house.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“somewhere.” Ruth presses her head. “Well, you two seem”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Could there be whites who might not, after all, hate her on sight for the ungivable forgiveness they needed from her?”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“But finally, the sunlight’s blaze doesn’t threaten the yellow of a flower. We only resent what we can still hope to be.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

“Musicians speak of bliss, but that’s just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control.”
― Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing