100 Quotes by 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.

Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.

I can’t comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.

But I can tell you this: that I am deeply proud of Rebecca. That she made a split-second decision to save the life of her son, turning the wheel of her vehicle so that her side of it would be impacted by an oncoming car instead of his. She gave her life in the exercise of the greatest gift that God grants us—the ability to change the trajectory of history.

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 hadn't happened.

Time travel would give humanity the ability to alter the past and prune the tree of all possible futures of those branches that had been infected by evil; with enough revisions humans would eventually bring about the one version of history that was fully good.

But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible worlds. I cannot bear this cold mathematician's God who sees all the universe as nothing more than an elaborate problem to be solved. Such a world is a world with no meaning, one in which one history is no more or less preferable to any other.

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

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.