Dexter Palmer, Version Control
24 quotes
"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"
"But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible worlds. I cannot bear this cold mathematician's God who sees all the universe as nothing more than an elaborate problem to be solved. Such a world is a world with no meaning, one in which one history is no more or less preferable to any other."
"As he drifted off, his father came to visit him, clothed in all his possible shapes."
"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."
"But I can tell you this: that I am deeply proud of Rebecca. That she made a split-second decision to save the life of her son, turning the wheel of her vehicle so that her side of it would be impacted by an oncoming car instead of his. She gave her life in the exercise of the greatest gift that God grants us—the ability to change the trajectory of history."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"She closed her eyes, and as had been her habit over these past couple of days, she began to imagine possible past histories and what she might have done to change them into the new one in which she lived, either inadvertently, or out of a misguided attempt to play God and make the world a better place, or, worse, with malice aforethought. Any time she spent in the past would have been clipped out of history, as neatly as if it had never happened, because it hadn't happened."
"But the arrogance of old age can cloak itself in the authority of past accomplishments, which can serve to confirm the belief that one’s arrogance is justly held. It can shield a man from the realization that his beliefs have calcified, that he can no longer assess a situation accurately at first glance, that the world has changed around him and left him behind. Guarded from this knowledge, he remains content."
"But who, in these modern times, slept well?"
"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."
"Later—how much later? Hard to tell. In times of tragedy clocks will trick you—Philip stood in the kitchen doorway."
"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."
"She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was"
"The device,' Philip said. 'What are you going to do with it?''I know how this sounds. But you'll have to trust us. We'll take possession of it. We're going to dismantle it; when we do so, the wormhole will close, making this the final version of history we live through. Then we're going to box up the device and forget about it. Lose it somewhere; burn the records. It'll end up in a warehouse right next to the Ark of Covenant."
"But the hair on her arms did not stand on end; she did not experience any strange instances of déjà vu; she did not see the ghosts of future selves shimmering before her, shouting stock picks back through time."
"But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—''By time traveli"