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The Overstory QUOTES

The Overstory QUOTES

1 " In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

2 " But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren't plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

3 " But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

4 " Soon enough, his learners will see across the planet. They'll watch the vast boreal forest from space and read the species-teeming tropics from eye level. They'll study rivers and measure what's in them. They'll collate the data of every wild creature ever tagged and map their wanderings. They'll read every sentence in every article that every field scientist ever published. They'll binge-watch every landscape that anyone has pointed a camera at. They'll listen to all the sounds of the streaming Earth. They'll do what the genes of their ancestors shaped them to do, what all their forebears have ever done themselves. They'll speculate on what it takes to live and put those speculations to the test. Then they'll say what life wants from people, and how it might use them. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

5 " There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.
(page 330) "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

6 " They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

7 " The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...] "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

8 " The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

9 " 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

10 " The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

11 " The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

12 " What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

13 " This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

14 " People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

15 " But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

16 " You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . . "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

17 " We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

18 " You can’t come back to something that is gone. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

19 " Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory

20 " There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking. "

― Richard Powers , The Overstory