Dexter Palmer 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 we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—''By time traveli

She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was

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.

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

Later—how much later? Hard to tell. In times of tragedy clocks will trick you—Philip stood in the kitchen doorway.

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.

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

But who, in these modern times, slept well?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

As he drifted off, his father came to visit him, clothed in all his possible shapes.

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