Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Quotes

“Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results. The private automobile provides a good illustration. Ford perfected the under-five-hundred-dollar automobile in the first decade of the century, but it took another seventy years for this country to find itself hostage to oil-rich nations, increasingly susceptible to respiratory and oncological diseases, unable to get from A to B except through private ownership, and every fifteen years acquiring enough highway fatalities to level the city of Houston.”
― Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: A Novel

“It is not hard to read subversion and heresy into the average work of a person’s hands. The task becomes easier when the work is ambitious, joyful, and revolutionary.”
― Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: A Novel

“His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.”
― Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

“...legend crystallized her life (Sarah Bernhardt) until she became her observers' rumors. At the end, we all become edited copy".”
― Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

“Since I don't smoke or drink or swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice.”
― Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance