Richard Powers

“Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results. The private automobile provides a good illustration. Ford perfected the under-five-hundred-dollar automobile in the first decade of the century, but it took another seventy years for this country to find itself hostage to oil-rich nations, increasingly susceptible to respiratory and oncological diseases, unable to get from A to B except through private ownership, and every fifteen years acquiring enough highway fatalities to level the city of Houston.” 
********

“...legend crystallized her life (Sarah Bernhardt) until she became her observers' rumors. At the end, we all become edited copy".” 

                               -----Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance