The Dream Of Perpetual Motion Quotes

“Certain parts of me became a little bit forgotten, a little bit numb, a little bit dead, and it was nice to have some dead places in me for a little while, to lose a little bit of my broken mind.”
― 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

“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 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

“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

“All of us have days in our lives, perhaps three or four at the most, when what we might call disparate events converge.”
― 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

“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

“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

“There's no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen.”
― 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

“I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense?”
― 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

“What's happened to her? The person that she is seems like a shell designed to cover up the person that Harold once knew her to be.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“And this,' Astrid says, gesturing at a wiry gentleman wearing eyeglasses and a houndstooth suit in need of pressing, standing a little distance away from the rest of the group, looking slightly uncomfortable, 'is Dexter Palmer, and he's a—what?'

'I,' says Dexter Palmer. 'Um.'

'He's a novelist,' Astrid brays, and Harold looks at Dexter, at his right arm rubbing his threadbare left elbow. Harold sees the oaken trunk in the corner of Dexter's filthy downtown loft with an enormous padlock on it, sees the tens of thousands of pages of handwritten manuscript that fill it. He sees the stub of the tallow candle on Dexter's rickety wooden desk, purchased for a dollar-fifty at a rummage sale. He sees the short leg of the desk propped up with a seven-hundred page study of phrenology, printed during the age of miracles. He sees Dexter's eyes going bad by candlelight, a whole diopter lost with each late night. 'Zounds, I am working on my masterpiece,' Dexter Palmer yells hoarsely, disturbing the neighbors. He slings a cup half-full of tepid chamomile tea at the wall, where it shatters.

'Dexter's writing a novel,' Astrid says brightly.

After a few minutes of introductory cross-talk, the group of five splits into separate conversations: Harold talks with his sister and Charmaine, while Marlon ends up with Dexter. To Harold, Marlon looks cornered—Harold can't hear what Dexter's saying, but whatever he's talking about, he's clearly going on about it at length and in fine detail. Maybe Marlon is getting to hear all about the novel. Every once in a while Marlon will look at Harold and theatrically roll his eyes and sigh, but Dexter, who's frantically gesticulating, wrapped up in whatever he's chattering about, doesn't notice.”
― 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 her.'

'Yeah, but that Dexter couldn't shut his piehole either,' Marlon says. 'I mean, Christ. Artists and writers—let them kill each other off in cage matches; let God sort 'em out.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“You must have also observed the masculine bias in the English language itself, in which women—literally, 'not men'—are daily confronted with the terror, unknowable to men, of concepts which they can imagine, but which an inherently patriarchal language does not allow them to express.”
― 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

“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

“M. and I ground against each other as if we were ill-fitting jigsaw pieces determined to jam together, even though one showed sidewalk, the other sky.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Howard!' she hollered as the machines pulled her under. 'Howard!' At least she didn't remember my name, either.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I've had enough of stories and lies; enough of silent scribbling. Enough of gears and engines. Enough of daydreams and false futures. Enough of virgins and dynamos.

One word from you is all I want, she said. Just speak one word, and we'll begin.

Enough of wasting time.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion