The Dream Of Perpetual Motion Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.

Dexter Palmer

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Howard!' she hollered as the machines pulled her under. 'Howard!' At least she didn't remember my name, either.

Dexter Palmer

#8. Ah, but can one person ever really know another? Are we not all mysteries to each other?

Dexter Palmer

#9. Best, perhaps to keep one's nickels forever in one's pockets, to savor delicious possibility over mundane experience.

Dexter Palmer

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. There's no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen.

Dexter Palmer

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you.

Dexter Palmer

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Love, no matter how high or low its form, must be requited, or the lover suffers.

Dexter Palmer

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. He falls asleep believing he's been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting.

Dexter Palmer

#24. It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both.

Dexter Palmer

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.

Dexter Palmer

#28. 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

#29. There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come.

Dexter Palmer

#30. I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.

Dexter Palmer

#31. And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.

Dexter Palmer

#32. We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once.

Dexter Palmer