100 Quotes by Dexter Palmer

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.

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.

. . . but what they were all waiting for, none could say; nor could one say whether they were all waiting for the same thing, or whether each was waiting for something entirely different.

But also: nightmares. The most delicious nightmares, the kind that one has only after the wall between the mundane and the magical is breached directly before one's eyes; nightmares that make you smile as you shiver in your sleep.

And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn’t thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking, just as people near the end of the twentieth century had lost the ability to remember the long and semi-random strings of digits that made up phone numbers once cellphones began to do that for them.

One ought to pretend that there is still hope, in this late season, for astonishment.

That friend of hers has got to go, though. You're lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of her.''Yeah, but that Dexter couldn't shut his piehole either,' Marlon says. 'I mean, Christ. Artists and writers—let them kill each other off in cage matches; let God sort 'em out.

But the arrogance of old age can cloak itself in the authority of past accomplishments, which can serve to confirm the belief that one’s arrogance is justly held. It can shield a man from the realization that his beliefs have calcified, that he can no longer assess a situation accurately at first glance, that the world has changed around him and left him behind. Guarded from this knowledge, he remains content.

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.