Top 71 Dexter Palmer Quotes
#1. But even though she was wise beyond her years, she was still young, and so was I, and all of our words were drowned out by the noise of our beating hearts, screaming at us that we were, after all, creatures of flesh and blood.
Dexter Palmer
#2. Nothing is as it should be. Everything is upside down.
But I know I can fix this. I can do it.
Dexter Palmer
#3. But I was not good enough. You should understand this about me - I am not a hero; not one to tap unknown reserves of courage; not one to rise to circumstance. I am the understudy who chokes on his lines when he is forced onto the stage. I am never, ever good enough.
Dexter Palmer
#4. We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once.
Dexter Palmer
#5. This is the last moment of contentment untainted by sorrow, when the brain hesitates before delivering the message to the heart that it knows it must.
Dexter Palmer
#6. And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.
Dexter Palmer
#7. Other lives wind themselves into your own and then leave for distant places or wink out like extinguished lamps, and then all the evidence you have that there was ever any time is a few scribbled words and a few blurred pictures. Then those burn in fire or blow away in wind and you have nothing.
Dexter Palmer
#8. As he drifted off, his father came to visit him, clothed in all his possible shapes.
Dexter Palmer
#9. I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.
Dexter Palmer
#10. There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come.
Dexter Palmer
#12. In fact, although I am not aware of it (and I am never aware of it, no matter how many times I have the dream) her suicide is a foregone conclusion. It is this way in dreams: when decisions are being made, they have already been made.
Dexter Palmer
#13. Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.
Dexter Palmer
#14. Perhaps my gift to you will be as simple as a single word, whispered into your ear by one of your servants as you lie on your deathbed, a word that solves a final mystery and makes it easy for you to slip quietly into the dark.
Dexter Palmer
#15. Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.
Dexter Palmer
#16. Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has many faces, none of which are false.
Dexter Palmer
#17. But I'm not saying that falsifiability makes science better; I'm saying it makes science good.
Dexter Palmer
#18. The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.
Dexter Palmer
#19. A lot of [people] have regular hours they're at work, and they sell their time for the money that lets them make the most of the time they have left over.
Dexter Palmer
#20. And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person's soul could never be fully surveyed.
Dexter Palmer
#21. It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both.
Dexter Palmer
#22. I want you to know that I'm just like you, and, just like you, sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together.
Dexter Palmer
#23. To agree to a marriage is to consent to a mutual act of transformation, to promise to ensure that the versions of yourselves that you will become will remain in harmony, though you yourselves can never stay the same.
Dexter Palmer
#24. Every page refresh promised the little dopamine kick that came from the shock of the new. Meanwhile,
Dexter Palmer
#25. He falls asleep believing he's been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting.
Dexter Palmer
#26. In the moment when he died at my hand he had his own heart's desire - not the actual future, but a hope for the best possible future, one that he could not himself imagine.
Dexter Palmer
#27. Certain parts of me became a little bit forgotten, a little bit numb, a little bit dead, and it was nice to have some dead places in me for a little while, to lose a little bit of my broken mind.
Dexter Palmer
#28. That friend of hers has got to go, though. You're lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of her.'
'Yeah, but that Dexter couldn't shut his piehole either,' Marlon says. 'I mean, Christ. Artists and writers - let them kill each other off in cage matches; let God sort 'em out.
Dexter Palmer
#29. We're in a time machine, Terence, you and I, right now. It's stuck in one gear and it's slow as hell, but it works. It's bringing us into the future. And I think that future might actually be good. I think it might be okay.
Dexter Palmer
#30. Write down everything you remember. You'll want to have it written down to look back on later, when your mind sands all the sharp edges off your memory and makes it into a dream that it will have you believe is true.
Dexter Palmer
#31. Later - how much later? Hard to tell. In times of tragedy clocks will trick you - Philip stood in the kitchen doorway.
Dexter Palmer
#32. Love, no matter how high or low its form, must be requited, or the lover suffers.
Dexter Palmer
#33. It is time to put down the pen; time to clear the throat. Speaking is a different thing altogether from writing. The spoken word has different properties, and different powers. If I have learned anything from writing down my own tale, it is this.
Dexter Palmer
#34. She has sold them some of her time for the money she needs to live, but hoarded these moments for herself, and each one is precious, to be wasted as she wishes.
Dexter Palmer
#35. Time travel would give humanity the ability to alter the past and prune the tree of all possible futures of those branches that had been infected by evil; with enough revisions humans would eventually bring about the one version of history that was fully good.
Dexter Palmer
#36. The causality violation device may be doing something else. May have already done it. Something wonderful and terrible.
Dexter Palmer
#37. I've had enough of stories and lies; enough of silent scribbling. Enough of gears and engines. Enough of daydreams and false futures. Enough of virgins and dynamos.
One word from you is all I want, she said. Just speak one word, and we'll begin.
Enough of wasting time.
Dexter Palmer
#38. What's happened to her? The person that she is seems like a shell designed to cover up the person that Harold once knew her to be.
Dexter Palmer
#39. As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you.
Dexter Palmer
#40. All of us have days in our lives, perhaps three or four at the most, when what we might call disparate events converge.
Dexter Palmer
#41. (T)he actions of humans that are most likely to "please God" are also those that allow humans to act collectively to mitigate the negative effects of chance on individual lives.
Dexter Palmer
#42. If everyone could get on the same page and realize that we live in the future, we wouldn't have to deal with this bullshit.
Dexter Palmer
#43. I like Carson. I really like Carson. I can hand an idea to him that's still a little rough, and he can turn it over and tumble it and hand it back to me shining. And I can do the same for him.
Dexter Palmer
#44. But life isn't neat the way a story is. And if you try to pretend it is, then you just make yourself unhappy, or screw yourself over.
Dexter Palmer
#45. I have already lost the knowledge of the word whose sound has the shape of a soul. But perhaps it's not too late. Come with me. Hurry now. We still have a chance to be young.
Dexter Palmer
#46. I can't comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.
Dexter Palmer
#47. Science fiction is the fantasy that science always works.
Dexter Palmer
#48. If God created humans with the ability to dictate the direction of history (by imagining future states of the universe and steering its path toward one version or another), then humanity's duty to God was to direct history toward the best of all possible worlds.
Dexter Palmer
#49. There's no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen.
Dexter Palmer
#50. I can tell you this. That in the absence of perfect information, I choose to believe in the version of events that would occur in the best of all possible worlds. What that version of events is: that's your decision. That's up to you. I can't decide that for you; I wouldn't try.
Dexter Palmer
#51. M. and I ground against each other as if we were ill-fitting jigsaw pieces determined to jam together, even though one showed sidewalk, the other sky.
Dexter Palmer
#52. Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It'll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.
Dexter Palmer
#53. Storytelling
that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.
Dexter Palmer
#54. It was hard to know what direction to take when you suddenly found yourself in a future different from the one you'd expected to be in the day before.
Dexter Palmer
#55. Best, perhaps to keep one's nickels forever in one's pockets, to savor delicious possibility over mundane experience.
Dexter Palmer
#56. If the future changed, and the time traveler we're talking about was from that future, and was the product of events that created that future, why wouldn't the time traveler also change when those events changed?
Dexter Palmer
#57. It is nice enough to be a child, but it is far rarer, and much more precious, to no longer be young, and to truly feel young again.
Dexter Palmer
#58. The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.
Dexter Palmer
#59. Ah, but can one person ever really know another? Are we not all mysteries to each other?
Dexter Palmer
#60. She drank the glass with breakfast and poured herself another. By the time she'd gotten Sean off to school (second grade) the edges had been taken off her thoughts and the world seemed as it should be: not too real, but real enough.
Dexter Palmer
#61. Howard!' she hollered as the machines pulled her under. 'Howard!' At least she didn't remember my name, either.
Dexter Palmer
#62. They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense?
Dexter Palmer
#63. But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.
Dexter Palmer
#64. I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.
Dexter Palmer
#65. You must have also observed the masculine bias in the English language itself, in which women - literally, 'not men' - are daily confronted with the terror, unknowable to men, of concepts which they can imagine, but which an inherently patriarchal language does not allow them to express.
Dexter Palmer
#66. If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was "false," the best thing he could say is that it was "interesting.
Dexter Palmer
#67. Isn't that the fantasy? If I go back in time, knowing what people back then didn't know, then I can change history! But history made you what you are. And it's bigger than any one man.
Dexter Palmer
#68. He pulled out his wallet and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, fastidiously folding it in half so that the crease cut across the face of Theodore Roosevelt, with its shining spectacles and its Chesire Cat grin.
Dexter Palmer
#69. I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.
Dexter Palmer
#70. Everything is as it should be; all is in its place. This is what Philip Steiner thinks.
Dexter Palmer
#71. He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked on him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken.
Dexter Palmer
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