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?

— Dexter Palmer

The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies

— Dexter Palmer

The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.

— 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

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 other's 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

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.

— Dexter Palmer

This is why it's 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.

— Dexter Palmer

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.

— 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