Top 35 Dexter Palmer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I can tell you this. That in the absence of perfect information, I choose to believe in the version of events that would occur in the best of all possible worlds. What that version of events is: that’s your decision. That’s up to you. I can’t decide that for you; I wouldn’t try.”

— Dexter Palmer

2. “But I was not good enough. You should understand this about me – I am not a hero; not one to tap unknown reserves of courage; not one to rise to circumstance. I am the understudy who chokes on his lines when he is forced onto the stage. I am never, ever good enough.”

— Dexter Palmer

3. “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?”

— Dexter Palmer

4. “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

5. “There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come.”

— Dexter Palmer

6. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

9. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

10. “You know what the problem with the real world is? It’s lonely. Because everyone goes online the second they get the chance! The real world is awesome if you want to be by yourself, though. Maybe that’s your thing now.”

— Dexter Palmer

11. “It is nice enough to be a child, but it is far rarer, and much more precious, to no longer be young, and to truly feel young again.”

— Dexter Palmer

12. “The true enemy of humanity was not Evil, an abstract idea personified by some sort of crimson-faced creature dancing in flames, but Chance, that smoky million-handed monster forever fitting its tiny fingers into the fissures of your life, working tear it apart, loosening the fatal screw, turning that first cell cancerous, sending lightning to strike the tree that you chose for shelter from the storm.”

— Dexter Palmer

13. “But to find a lingering unread missive from someone no longer living, and someone whose life had been so deeply entwined with one’s own, raised the possibility that the past could never be a fully settled matter. It meant that your own past could be altered without your action or consent, that the story of your self that you continually told back to yourself could be revised by force, making you into another person who you would, perhaps, prefer not to become.”

— Dexter Palmer

14. “We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once.”

— Dexter Palmer

15. “I want you to know that I’m just like you, and, just like you, sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together.”

— Dexter Palmer

16. “But here is what you need to understand – here is why you are in danger. Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.”

— Dexter Palmer

17. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

18. “I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.”

— Dexter Palmer

19. “As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you.”

— Dexter Palmer

20. “All of us have days in our lives, perhaps three or four at the most, when what we might call disparate events converge.”

— Dexter Palmer

21. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

22. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

23. “There’s no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen.”

— Dexter Palmer

24. “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 are false.”

— Dexter Palmer

25. “It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both.”

— Dexter Palmer

26. “I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.”

— Dexter Palmer

27. “Science fiction is the fantasy that science always works.”

— Dexter Palmer

28. “Perhaps Phillip was just not interested in becoming stronger; perhaps it was not the exercise itself that mattered to him, but the experience of it. Maybe he wanted to set the tone of each morning by always trying, always failing, the consequent band of pain across his chest serving as a reminder of that failure to carry him through the day.”

— Dexter Palmer

29. “Certain parts of me became a little bit forgotten, a little bit numb, a little bit dead, and it was nice to have some dead places in me for a little while, to lose a little bit of my broken mind.”

— Dexter Palmer

30. “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.”

— Dexter Palmer

31. “But I’m not saying that falsifiability makes science better; I’m saying it makes science good.”

— Dexter Palmer

32. “But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.”

— Dexter Palmer

33. “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

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

— Dexter Palmer

35. “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