The Overstory Quotes

“Someday you’ll need to take down a worn-out volume and flip to that passage on the lower right-hand face, ten pages from the end, that fills you with such sweet and vicious pain.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we're near...when you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“If you want a person to help you, convince them that they've already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“It's a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you've already made.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“In fact, it's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won't believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they'll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There’s no other explanation: almost all the tree’s mass has come from the very air.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Here’s the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It’s a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It’s a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It’s the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We don't make reality. We evade it. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory