Plowing the Dark Quotes

“She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future’s breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She’d read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets—tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“zoomable from a hundred miles per yard clown to about ten.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“We made this! It’s so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team’s list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim’s body could begin to guess.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

“Something in those jittery black-and-golden scraps recalled her sight’s desire. So it always went, with life and its paler imitations.”
― Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark