Quotes by Dexter Palmer

The thing about memories wasnt 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 mathematicians 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.

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.Whats 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 thats 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 were blind; it takes the caliper to a young womans 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.

First, the idea of the multiverse is essentially the fantasy of preserving perfect information. One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say thats essentially what regret is: a profound problem of incomplete information. If you select one thing on a diners menu, you cant know what it would have been like to taste other things on it, right then, right there. When you marry one person, you give up the possibility of knowing what it would have been like to have married any number of others. But if the multiverse exists, you can at least imagine theres another version of you whos eating that other thing you thought about ordering, or whos married to that other man you only went on two dates with. Even if youll never see all the information for yourself, at least youll be able to tell yourself that its

There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: theres a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and youre on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now.But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. Its infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: its our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

The scientific method entails two assumptions that are so basic that, even if you spell them out, they are still difficult to keep in mind. First: that the observer stays the same while the world changes. Second: that cause precedes effect.But the very nature of the experiment we are conducting means that the second of these assumptions is thrown into doubt. We are deliberately attempting to engineer an event in which effect chronologically precedes cause.If one of these assumptions is under threat, why not the other?

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

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.

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

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

But to find a lingering unread missive from someone no longer living, and someone whose life had been so deeply entwined with one’s own, raised the possibility that the past could never be a fully settled matter. It meant that your own past could be altered without your action or consent, that the story of your self that you continually told back to yourself could be revised by force, making you into another person who you would, perhaps, prefer not to become.

I have already lost the knowledge of the word whose sound has the shape of a soul. But perhaps its not too late. Come with me. Hurry now. We still have a chance to be young.

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 persons soul could never be fully surveyed.

Storytelling--thats not the future. The future, Im afraid, is flashes and impulses. Its mode up of moments and fragments, and stories wont survive.

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.

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

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.

In the middle of all the worlds incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that Id mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since Id last seen Miranda shed come to somehow stand in for all the things I didnt 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.