## Metadata - Author: [[Richard Powers]] - Full Title: The Overstory - Category: #books ## Highlights - In this way, acorn animism turns bit by bit into its offspring, botany. ([Location 1769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1769)) - He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise. People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air. ([Location 1770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1770)) - “Ah, buy me a hillside that slopes away from town.” ([Location 1778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1778)) - real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking. ([Location 1799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1799)) - “If you see a trunk carved full of letters, it’s a beech. People can’t help writing all over that smooth gray surface. God love ’em. They want to watch their lettered hearts growing bigger, year after year. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress’ name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!” He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters. ([Location 1808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1808)) - It’s a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antennae arrays form up into thylakoid discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious ginkgo. ([Location 1928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1928)) - “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.” ([Location 1934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=1934)) - There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green. ([Location 2230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=2230)) - 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. ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=2265)) - “Why the giveaway? I don’t know. It felt like another artwork. The last of the series. Trees give it all away, don’t they?” The equation electrifies her. Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong. ([Location 2710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=2710)) - The fact is, their obsessions interlock. Each has half of a secret message. What else can he do but try to fit the halves together? And if they spin out, wake from the dream with nothing, what has he sacrificed but solitary waiting? ([Location 3093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=3093)) - His housemate hums to herself as she prepares for departure. Her frown stops his breathing. She’s young and guileless, stripped of fear, with a calling stronger than any medieval nun’s. He could no more pass up a road trip with her than he can stop turning his dreams into drawings. He was decamping anyway. Now his life has a luxury he’s never had: a destination, and someone to head there with. ([Location 3099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=3099)) - Two weeks in a house together in a midwestern midwinter, and he doesn’t even try to touch her. That’s the only delusional part. And she knows he won’t. Her body, around him, is untainted by anything so crude as nervousness. She’s no warier of him than a lake’s surface is wary of the wind. ([Location 3102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073VX7HT4&location=3102))