Bewilderment Quotes

“There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good - as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain's sting and the smell of living soil - the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. —RACHEL CARSON”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Trouble is what creates intelligence? I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval. His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“How would we ever know aliens? We can’t even know birds.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Oddly enough, there’s no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“... mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet's surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35.786 km upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Life is something we need to stop correcting.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Smartphones are miracles, and they’ve turned us into gods. But in one simple respect, they’re primitive: you can’t slam down the receiver.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“The laws that govern the light from a firefly in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthling have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“The world had become something no schoolchild should be allowed to discover.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“There was a planet that couldn't figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning out there. I”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“I'd missed something obvious in over thirty years of reading and two thousand science fiction books: there was no place stranger than here.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers”
― Richard Powers, Bewilderment