Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
32 quotes
"As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you."
"It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both."
"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."
"Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me."
"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."
"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."
"And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want."
"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 hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren't inventions of other human minds."
"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."
"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."
"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 anything from writing down my own tale, it is this."
"I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must."
"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."
"Love, no matter how high or low its form, must be requited, or the lover suffers."
"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."
"That friend of hers has got to go, though. You're lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"He falls asleep believing he's been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting."
"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."