Quotes by Dexter Palmer

This is why its 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.

What we are proposing, Alicia said, is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.Carson interrupted. Including the memories of any—Purely hypothetical——time travelers.So take our time traveler from the traditional story, Carson continued. He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesnt see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesnt remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.

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?

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 pulled out his wallet and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, fastidiously folding it in half so that the crease cut across the face of Theodore Roosevelt, with its shining spectacles and its Chesire Cat grin.

She hadnt gone back in time. The idea was

The device, Philip said. What are you going to do with it?I know how this sounds. But youll have to trust us. Well take possession of it. Were going to dismantle it; when we do so, the wormhole will close, making this the final version of history we live through. Then were going to box up the device and forget about it. Lose it somewhere; burn the records. Itll end up in a warehouse right next to the Ark of Covenant.

But the hair on her arms did not stand on end; she did not experience any strange instances of déjà vu; she did not see the ghosts of future selves shimmering before her, shouting stock picks back through time.

If the future changed, and the time traveler were talking about was from that future, and was the product of events that created that future, why wouldnt the time traveler also change when those events changed?

You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree—that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesnt just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root thats back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch.

But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—By time traveli

She closed her eyes, and as had been her habit over these past couple of days, she began to imagine possible past histories and what she might have done to change them into the new one in which she lived, either inadvertently, or out of a misguided attempt to play God and make the world a better place, or, worse, with malice aforethought. Any time she spent in the past would have been clipped out of history, as neatly as if it had never happened, because it hadnt happened.

“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”