Home > Work > The Dream of Perpetual Motion

The Dream of Perpetual Motion QUOTES

The Dream of Perpetual Motion QUOTES

1 " 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

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

― Dexter Palmer , The Dream of Perpetual Motion

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " Love, no matter how high or low its form, must be requited, or the lover suffers. "

― Dexter Palmer , The Dream of Perpetual Motion

19 " 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

20 " 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