Generosity Quotes

“When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.”
― Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement

“Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.”
― Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement

“Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.”
― Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement

“Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.”
― Richard Powers , Generosity: An Enhancement

“The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.”
― Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement

“We’re shaped to think the things we want will make us happy. But shaped to take only the briefest thrill in getting. Wanting is what having wants to recover.”
― Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement