{"quotes":[{"text":"We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["dexter-palmer","futures","perfection","possibilities","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion"],"id":8721,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"In fact, although I am not aware of it (and I am never aware of it, no matter how many times I have the dream) her suicide is a foregone conclusion. It is this way in dreams: when decisions are being made, they have already been made.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["decisions","dexter-palmer","dreams","foregone-conclusion","predetermined","recurring-dreams","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion","unstoppable"],"id":16258,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["dexter palmer","fantasy","ideal","idealized","put on a pedestal","symbol","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion"],"id":29643,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["change","coming-of-age","dexter-palmer","life-changing","narrator","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion","transformation"],"id":43907,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["beginning","bittersweet","dexter palmer","ending","hello","impermanence","miracle","nothing-lasts-forever","perpetual-motion","poignant","redemption","sad","science-fiction","steampunk","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion"],"id":54062,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["cryogenically frozen","dexter palmer","future","science fiction","the dream of perpetual motion"],"id":63249,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"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?","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["dexter palmer","expectations vs reality","moon landing","science fiction","space travel","steampunk","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion","the-moon"],"id":72759,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"Best, perhaps to keep one's nickels forever in one's pockets, to savor delicious possibility over mundane experience.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["anticipation","dexter-palmer","experience","possibility","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion"],"id":91967,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"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.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["depression","dexter-palmer","dissatisfied","faking-it","godless","going-through-the-motions","meaningless","modern-society","not-good-enough","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion"],"id":113936,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"},{"text":"He falls asleep believing he's been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting.","author":"Dexter Palmer","tags":["demons","dexter palmer","foreshadowing","ominous","summoning","the-dream-of-perpetual-motion","unwitting"],"id":168951,"author_id":"Dexter+Palmer"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}