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.

— 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 like Carson. I really like Carson. Furthermore, I can hand an idea to him that's still a little rough, and he can turn it over and tumble it and hand it back to me shining. And I can do the same for him.

— 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

…inside a year, almost all the stuff of which you were made got regularly switched out for other stuff, as you ate and drank and breathed, and yet if you said you had the same identity you did a year ago, no one would think to call you a liar. Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has many faces, none of which is false.

— 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

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.

— 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

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