The Overstory Quotes by Richard Powers

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

when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

In the words of novelist Richard Powers, trees teach us about ‘life at the speed of wood’.21 The art of long-term thinking may lie in the capacity to think in ‘tree time’, a scale of hundreds and thousands of years that can open our minds to the depths of time.

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.

And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do .