Quotes by Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

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

“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to some...”

“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 bei...”

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

“Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the ho...”

“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.”

“In the moment when he died at my hand he had his own heart's desirenot the actual future, but a hope for the best possible future, one that he could not himself imagine.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 an...”

“At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you thin...”

“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.”

“The machines of this place are failing, and the woman and I are here all alone. The perpetual motion engine, as brilliant and beautiful as it is, is running downnothing lasts forever. But before th...”

“Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities bel...”

“She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgement and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole ...”

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

“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.”

“Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know....”

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