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Famous Dexter Palmer Quotes

“She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgement and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky.”

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“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.”

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“He would talk, and I would talk, and he would talk, and each of our words sounded out the deepest secret depths inside us. There are some forms of love that words can do no justice to. There are some scars that can't be seen. Perfection is in itself an imperfection. He had flaws. He was sick. He needed help. Is not everyone sick, at one time or another? That was part of his beauty, his sickness. If he had not been sick, he would not have been beautiful, in the way that consumptives are, burning themselves up in brilliant flashes of light . . . I don't expect you to be able to understand. Love is strong enough to resurrect the dead. I don't like the word scar, because it implies intent and blame. A soul as powerful as his had to burn. I have never known a love like this. You don't know. I would have done anything at all for him. You don't know. It feels so goddamn good to be needed, to have someone tell you that he has a gaping hole in him whose shape is made to fit you . . . I saw that he was burning a piece of art on me, a signature on my psyche because it filled the hole in his own, and he wanted to make me his.”

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“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?”

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“I am going to tell a story now, and though I've made a life out of writing words, this is the first time I have told a story. There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but the fragments of phrases that signalled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.”

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“For with each bite he tasted not just the irresistible sweetness of the dessert, but the deliciously agonizing negative flavor of all the imagined foodstuffs that he could have bought with that nickel instead—a turkey leg the size of his forearm, or a milkshake with a pair of deep red strawberries floating on its surface. The single relinquished nickel sat in the custard seller's till, its gold transmuted back to lead.”

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“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.”

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“The constant clamor of the booths and barkers served as an exhausting reminder that he had to choose a fate, and that no matter which fate he chose he could be certain that it would not be the best, that in other timelines rendered inaccessible with each spent coin, other versions of himself would be having more fun, or winning golden ribbons, or becoming taller. The thought was unbearable.”

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“Her voice never stops: even when I sleep, it is a shining silver thread running through most of my dreams and all my nightmares, whispering, beseeching, threatening: One word from you is all I want. Just speak one word, and we'll begin. Name, rank, and serial number, perhaps the misquoted lyrics from a popular song: anything will do. From there we'll move with slow cautious steps to gentle verbal sparring, twice-told tales, descriptions of the scarred and darkest places of our old and worn-out souls. I'll love you back; I'll tell you secrets—”

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“It seems strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as 'I,' especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was . . . the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale that shows how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me.”

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“Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?”

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“And this,' Astrid says, gesturing at a wiry gentleman wearing eyeglasses and a houndstooth suit in need of pressing, standing a little distance away from the rest of the group, looking slightly uncomfortable, 'is Dexter Palmer, and he's a—what?' 'I,' says Dexter Palmer. 'Um.' 'He's a novelist,' Astrid brays, and Harold looks at Dexter, at his right arm rubbing his threadbare left elbow. Harold sees the oaken trunk in the corner of Dexter's filthy downtown loft with an enormous padlock on it, sees the tens of thousands of pages of handwritten manuscript that fill it. He sees the stub of the tallow candle on Dexter's rickety wooden desk, purchased for a dollar-fifty at a rummage sale. He sees the short leg of the desk propped up with a seven-hundred page study of phrenology, printed during the age of miracles. He sees Dexter's eyes going bad by candlelight, a whole diopter lost with each late night. 'Zounds, I am working on my masterpiece,' Dexter Palmer yells hoarsely, disturbing the neighbors. He slings a cup half-full of tepid chamomile tea at the wall, where it shatters. 'Dexter's writing a novel,' Astrid says brightly. After a few minutes of introductory cross-talk, the group of five splits into separate conversations: Harold talks with his sister and Charmaine, while Marlon ends up with Dexter. To Harold, Marlon looks cornered—Harold can't hear what Dexter's saying, but whatever he's talking about, he's clearly going on about it at length and in fine detail. Maybe Marlon is getting to hear all about the novel. Every once in a while Marlon will look at Harold and theatrically roll his eyes and sigh, but Dexter, who's frantically gesticulating, wrapped up in whatever he's chattering about, doesn't notice.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company's 'I'd Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You' line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises.”

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“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.”

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