Dream Of Perpetual Motion Quotes & Sayings

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

There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come. — Dexter Palmer

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

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

Ah, but can one person ever really know another? Are we not all mysteries to each other? — Dexter Palmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as 'I,' especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was . . . the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale that shows how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me. — Dexter Palmer

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

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

There's no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen. — Dexter Palmer

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

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

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

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

Howard!' she hollered as the machines pulled her under. 'Howard!' At least she didn't remember my name, either. — Dexter Palmer

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

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

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

They do not know that the dream is a constant in life. They do not know that the dream is wine, it's fizz, it's yeast. It's an eager and vivacious small animal with a pointy nose that pries through everything in a perpetual motion. They do not know that the dream is canvas and color and brush. They do not know nor even dream that dream commands life. When a man or a woman dreams, the world leaps and moves forward like a colorful ball in the hands of a child. — Antonio Gedeao

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her voice never stops: even when I sleep, it is a shining silver thread running through most of my dreams and all my nightmares, whispering, beseeching, threatening: One word from you is all I want. Just speak one word, and we'll begin. Name, rank, and serial number, perhaps the misquoted lyrics from a popular song: anything will do. From there we'll move with slow cautious steps to gentle verbal sparring, twice-told tales, descriptions of the scarred and darkest places of our old and worn-out souls. I'll love you back; I'll tell you secrets - — Dexter Palmer

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