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The Dream of Perpetual Motion Quotes
It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.What’s the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that’s beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we’re blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman’s head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.
— 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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
For with each bite he tasted not just the irresistible sweetness of the dessert, but the deliciously agonizing negative flavor of all the imagined foodstuffs that he could have bought with that nickel instead—a turkey leg the size of his forearm, or a milkshake with a pair of deep red strawberries floating on its surface. The single relinquished nickel sat in the custard seller’s till, its gold transmuted back to lead.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
This is why it’s good manners to give gifts in wrappers: so that, for a moment, that beast in all of us that makes us feel alive and keeps us from becoming angels can be satisfied. While a gift is in a wrapper, it can be anything, even that one indescribable thing that will make us happy enough to die in peace.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company’s ‘I’d Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You’ line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
If the future changed, and the time traveler we’re talking about was from that future, and was the product of events that created that future, why wouldn’t the time traveler also change when those events changed?
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
He falls asleep believing he’s been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Love, no matter how high or low its form, must be requited, or the lover suffers.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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 somehow stand in for all the things I didn’t have in life that were thought to make us human, all the absent music and touch and sympathy; in my mind she lived a separate life apart from her real one, and there she grew more pure and perfect with each passing day . . . In my mind Miranda had become a miracle.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Best, perhaps to keep one’s nickels forever in one’s pockets, to savor delicious possibility over mundane experience.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
That friend of hers has got to go, though. You’re lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
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