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“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)”
― Walt Whitman

“We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Creatures, all of whome heard humans and knew them as just a part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge, for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The whole race suffered from Capgras. those birds danced like our next of kin, called and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: Imposters. at most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“Words didn’t come. I couldn’t formulate a thought. I was too startled. These three figures lying in the sand in front of me weren’t surfers at all.
They weren’t even people.

From their facial features and upper torsos, they looked kind of like women, but all three of them had silver-colored skin. They were bald, with strange ridges marking their skulls. None of them seemed to have ears, only holes in the sides of their heads. No nose was visible, not even a bone or nostrils filled that space between their eyes and mouths. Although their mouths seemed to be moving, they were actually breathing through what looked like gills in their necks.

And if that wasn’t weird enough, instead of legs, their upper torsos stretched out into long, scale-covered, silver fishtails. If I had to say what these things stranded in front of me, splattered with oil, appeared to be, I’d say mermaids. And no, they didn’t look like they’d start singing songs or granting me wishes. They looked a little bit scary—but fragile too. Most of all, they looked like they were going to die, and no handsome prince was there to kiss them and keep them from turning into sea foam.”
― D.G. Driver, Cry of the Sea

“I one saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to rebuild a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since i have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree, i think i am entitled to speak for the field mouse. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“Tecumseh tried to unite the scattered nations under the banner of Crane Power, but the Hopi mark for the crane's foot became the world's peace symbol.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“(Memory) A few dozen cells, slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that shaped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“(Culture) Some part of us could model some other modeler. and out of that simple loop came all the love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“(Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“A woman of her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can't use her? we're down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she's going to roll over and die?”
― Richard Powers, The Echo Maker

“We are all potential fossils, still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going beyond the reach of rivers. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“Whenever I looked upon a peaceful scene, it seemed to be part of my DNA to superimpose miserable images over what I saw. Hideous images became superimposed over a relaxed, happy landscape. Shards of glass, blood dotting my white sneakers and the cement floor, skin stinging as if I'd been sprayed with salt, cows stumbling and dying, a long mirror showing the backs of cancer patients, people burning up in flames, women wailing, acid rain, and my body scattering in all directions.”
― Kang Young-sook, At Night He Lifts Weights

“We want to wake up and feel that we're useful, that we're leaving the world a better place for our children and their children. I hate feeling that I'm making everything worse because I'm locked in a system I can't change, that's destroying the world I love. I want to feel that I can do what I'm good at and be valued for it. We all do. Human creativity is absolutely f-ing amazing. There are people all round this country - the whole world - with ideas that could make things better if we could just agree that we all want to be safe, to be respected, to be loved, and then work out how to get from where we are to where we want to be.”
― Manda Scott, Any Human Power