Dexter Palmer Quotes

She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was

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.

But the hair on her arms did not stand on end; she did not experience any strange instances of déjà vu; she did not see the ghosts of future selves shimmering before her, shouting stock picks back through time.

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.

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.

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.

He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked on him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken.

And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you liked the things Big Data told you you were likely to like, and you loved the people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.