Blurbos Rating (4)
Highlights
A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 3 | Location 30-30 2020-07-26 00:45:43
By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 87-87 2020-07-26 00:51:27
Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 107-111 2020-07-26 00:53:54
“Do you remember?” Jørgen asks the woman who holds his hand. “Prospect Hill? How we ate that night!” He nods toward the leafy limbs, the land beyond. “I gave you that. And you gave me—all of this! This country. My life. My freedom.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 125-127 2020-07-26 00:55:45
A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 58 | Location 896-898 2020-07-27 00:29:46
Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 943-944 2020-07-27 00:34:05
Good Macduff hides behind their cut branches (Many living things were harmed in the making of this production), hoping he’ll remember his next lines, praying he’ll defeat the usurper again tonight, and marveling at the strange, irregular, lobed shapes fleshing out his camouflage like the letters of an alphabet from outer space, each glyph shaped by something that looks for all the world like deliberation. He can’t read the text on his banner. It’s written by a thing with five hundred million root tips. It says, Oak and door come from the same ancient word.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1021-1025 2020-07-28 01:19:11
You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 1089-1091 2020-07-28 01:24:31
The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1294-1294 2020-07-30 01:02:08
But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1302-1304 2020-07-30 01:03:04
In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 84 | Location 1304-1305 2020-07-30 01:03:18
The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 85 | Location 1313-1313 2020-07-30 01:04:19
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.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 89 | Location 1383-1384 2020-07-30 01:11:09
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.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 89 | Location 1383-1384 2020-07-30 01:11:19
“Patience is the maker of all good things.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1422-1423 2020-07-30 01:21:48
Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1454-1454 2020-07-30 01:24:06
Their comfort scares the crap out of him. “You’ve been through a lot,” the doctor says. But Neelay has been through nothing. His body, perhaps. His avatar. But he? Nothing important in the code has changed.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 104 | Location 1619-1621 2020-07-31 00:32:44
But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1790-1790 2020-08-01 01:00:00
Patricia blooms like something southern-facing.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 119 | Location 1856-1856 2020-08-01 01:06:18
trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked. Something alerts them. They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare. She controls for everything she can, and the results are always the same. Only one conclusion makes any sense: The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 125 | Location 1958-1962 2020-08-01 01:15:50
other animal closes ranks faster than Homo sapiens.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 127 | Location 1987-1988 2020-08-01 01:18:03
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. . .
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 132 | Location 2070-2071 2020-08-02 01:15:57
Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful. She sees the source of that forestry doctrine she so resisted in school. Looking at all this glorious decay, a person might be forgiven for thinking that old meant decadent, that such thick mats of decomposition were cellulose cemeteries in need of the rejuvenating ax.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 134 | Location 2105-2108 2020-08-02 01:19:28
She labors for days to make a storage pad, hacking back the brush from a few square feet. By year’s end, the little nick in the undergrowth is covered again in shrub and saplings. She loves feeling that every headway man tries to make into the relentless green blitz will be crushed.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 137 | Location 2141-2144 2020-08-02 01:22:46
She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 144 | Location 2265-2267 2020-08-02 01:32:53
It should have occurred to her two years ago, even in the initial thrill, that any relationship where she lied three times in the first two hours might not be a great long-term bet.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2325-2326 2020-08-02 01:38:43
She has no answering machine. Who would use a device that leaves you responsible for calling someone back?
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 149 | Location 2339-2339 2020-08-02 01:40:11
Humans are so frail. How have they survived long enough to wreak all the shit they have?
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 151 | Location 2370-2371 2020-08-02 01:42:54
YEARS BEFORE and far to the northwest, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly Brinkman head back home after midnight from the party following the St. Paul Players’ opening night of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They’ve just played the young couple Nick and Honey, who, over a few drinks with new friends, learn what their species can do.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 165 | Location 2544-2546 2020-08-04 00:41:08
What a dump, they both think, though neither needs to say it.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 167 | Location 2566-2567 2020-08-04 00:40:46
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe. It’s stupid to believe anything at all. We’re always, always wrong.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2752-2753 2020-08-04 00:55:20
“I hear myself best when I’m sleeping.” He puts her in his grandparents’ room,
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2765-2766 2020-08-04 00:56:19
“I hear myself best when I’m sleeping.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2765-2766 2020-08-04 00:56:40
If memories change the pathways of the brain, then the trail must still be there.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 196 | Location 3040-3041 2020-08-05 20:30:05
People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end. Nicholas knows all this; he has cleaned house after his dead parents and grandparents, made all the terrible discoveries that only death affords. How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 199 | Location 3089-3093 2020-08-05 20:38:27
“Everything’s wrong. Starting with the title.” “What’s wrong with How Trees Will Save the World? Trees won’t save the world?” “I’m sure they will. After the world shrugs us off.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 223 | Location 3466-3469 2020-08-07 01:03:43
In the festive atmosphere, under so blue a sky, walking arm in arm with strangers up the slight grade, Mimi sees.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 240 | Location 3752-3753 2020-08-08 00:55:36
She’s the squirrel, Ratatoskr, scaling Yggdrasil, carrying messages between hell, heaven, and here.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 261 | Location 4091-4092 2020-08-10 01:36:45
“I never knew how strong a drug other people are.” “The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused.” “How long does it take to . . . detox?” He considers. “Nobody’s ever clean.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 267 | Location 4192-4194 2020-08-10 01:44:53
above them, through the blue-black needles, in a river of spilled milk. The night sky—the best drug there was, before people came together into something
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 269 | Location 4218-4219 2020-08-11 00:37:48
The night sky—the best drug there was, before people came together into something stronger.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 269 | Location 4219-4219 2020-08-11 00:37:54
“You know,” she says, “if one of us falls, the other is going with.” “I’ll follow you anywhere.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 269 | Location 4220-4221 2020-08-11 00:37:26
Almost every part of need is created by a reflex, phantasmal, and democratic committee whose job is to turn one season’s necessities into the next’s yard sales.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 332 | Location 5216-5217 2020-08-13 00:39:51
of our lungs, and no one hearing.” “We accomplished more in two nights than we did with years of effort.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 344 | Location 5404-5405 2020-08-14 01:43:55
“All the protests. All the letters. Getting beat up. Shouting at the top of our lungs, and no one hearing.” “We accomplished more in two nights than we did with years of effort.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 344 | Location 5404-5405 2020-08-14 01:44:06
You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 375 | Location 5839-5840 2020-08-16 02:28:46
“Dory. I can’t do this anymore. My halo’s falling off. Sainthood’s overrated.” “Yes. So is sinnerhood.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 396 | Location 6178-6179 2020-08-20 01:09:58
Love, as all the good novels know, is a question of title, deed, and possession.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 396 | Location 6188-6189 2020-08-20 01:11:16
At first glance, there’s only the man in the frozen terror mask, the one she has gotten used to, at last. Then she turns and sees. She lowers herself to the bed, next to him. The television is saying, “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.” Saying, “That is the second tower. That just happened. Live. On our screen.”
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 397 | Location 6196-6198 2020-08-20 01:12:27
No one suspects how hard it is to hold another’s gaze for more than three seconds. A quarter minute and they’re in agony—introverts and extroverts, dominants and submissives alike. Scopophobia hits them all—fear of seeing and being seen.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 400 | Location 6249-6251 2020-08-20 01:16:33
He has forgotten even those things about her face that used to make him feel like he could suck in air and with a lazy sigh breathe out eternity.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 448 | Location 7041-7042 2020-08-24 01:53:11
The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 454 | Location 7130-7135 2020-08-24 02:01:22
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 482 | Location 7522-7523 2020-08-25 01:24:37
A human can feel only so many things, and once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 488 | Location 7618-7619 2020-08-25 01:30:15
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God.
<The Overstory: A Novel>(Powers, Richard) Your Highlight on page 498 | Location 7781-7783 2020-08-25 01:38:39