DPDexter Palmer

71 collected words

Dexter Palmer

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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 / quote

02Undated

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

Dexter Palmer / quote

03Undated

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 / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

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 think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you've read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust.

Dexter Palmer / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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

Dexter Palmer / quote

08Undated

And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn’t thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking, just as people near the end of the twentieth century had lost the ability to remember the long and semi-random strings of digits that made up phone numbers once cellphones began to do that for them.

Dexter Palmer / quote

09Undated

This had been happening more and more often: the two of us come upon each other by accident in the early hours of the morning and take solace in each others' company, weathering out the peril of being awake at this time of night, when thoughts that are neatly ordered or justly murdered during the day come loose from their moorings and out of their graves, to tie themselves to each other in new and dangerous ways.

Dexter Palmer / quote

10Undated

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

Dexter Palmer / quote

11Undated

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 / quote

12Undated

That friend of hers has got to go, though. You're lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of

Dexter Palmer / quote

13Undated

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 down—nothing lasts forever. But before this little world falls out of the sky there still might be time enough for redemption. There is still time for me to say the words that I should have had the courage to say at the beginning.There is still time, perhaps, for one more miracle.Hello, Miranda.

Dexter Palmer / quote

14Undated

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 below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

Dexter Palmer / quote

15Undated

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 until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky.

Dexter Palmer / quote

16Undated

That's one of our speculations, by the way. That the prior version of history that this one overwrote was horrible. Complete geopolitical mayhem; half of New York City is underwater. The United States is headed toward civil war, or ruled by an artificial-intelligence construct, or some such other thing. Real end-of-days stuff. That the instances of ourselves who existed in that history figured out what we have: that the invention of the causality violation device was the cause. That in that prior version of history, Rebecca did not die in a car accident. That she went back to the past on a mission, as a volunteer, well aware of her sacrifice.

Dexter Palmer / quote

17Undated

…inside of a year, almost all of the stuff of which you were made got regularly switched out for other stuff, as you ate and drank and breathed, and yet if you said you had the same identity you did a year ago, no one would think to call you a liar. 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 is false.

Dexter Palmer / quote

18Undated

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

Dexter Palmer / quote

19Undated

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 / quote

20Undated

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 / quote

21Undated

And as Sean climbs into bed and closes his eyes, Mother comes, riding astride a lion the size of a house, blowing a clarion from a horn made out of a hollowed-out elephant's tusk. Her eyes have a faint crimson glow from the lasers that are mounted behind her irises, ready to fire at will.'I touched a prince's chest today and made his heart stop,' she says. 'I'll do it again if I have to: they'll see what happens if anyone gets in my way. Good night, my son. Remember that I will always keep you safe; that I am always everywhere and always here.''Good night, Mom,' Sean says, and falls asleep.And Mother recedes, wise and beautiful and strong, a genius and a hero, a punisher of thieves and a slayer of wicked men, to watch over her son in all her different versions.

Dexter Palmer / quote

22Undated

And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you liked the things Big Data told you you were likely to like, and you loved the people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.

Dexter Palmer / quote

23Undated

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 / quote

24Undated

The constant clamor of the booths and barkers served as an exhausting reminder that he had to choose a fate, and that no matter which fate he chose he could be certain that it would not be the best, that in other timelines rendered inaccessible with each spent coin, other versions of himself would be having more fun, or winning golden ribbons, or becoming taller. The thought was unbearable.

Dexter Palmer / quote