Quotes from The Time of Our Singing

Richard Powers ·  631 pages

Rating: (2.2K votes)


“In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing



“All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing



“Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing



About the author

Richard Powers
Born place: in Evanston, Illinois, The United States
Born date June 18, 1957
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