Blake Crouch Quotes

We're more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.

It's terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches off into a new world.

Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?

He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD

No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you're least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.

As long as I'm with you, I know exactly who I am.

We're all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglass.

Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.

It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.

I know everything feels hopeless to you in this moment, but this is just a moment, and moments pass.

I’ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.

Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

The box isn't all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you'll find.

I wish we lived in a world where actions were measured by the intentions behind them. But the truth is, they’re measured by their consequences.

Everything will look better in the morning. There will be hope again when the light returns. The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.

Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.

My soul knows your soul. In any time.

He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.” Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.

If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?

Is it possible to outthink yourself?

Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.

When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.

I can’t help thinking that we’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.

The older I get, the less I understand.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there's no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.

He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

There’s something horribly lonely about a place that’s almost home.

Like people would ever want to read books on an electronic screen.

This low point isn't the book of your life. It's just a chapter.

Is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

I think balance is for people who don't know why they're here.

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He's experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.

Suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn't lead to truth.

It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.

We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.

I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?

Will I keep fighting to be the man I think I am? Or will I disown him and everything he loves, and step into the skin of the person this world would like for me to be?

When every memory contains a universe, what does simple even mean?

I’m looking for a grain of sand on an infinite beach.

All your life you’re told you’re unique. An individual. That no one on the planet is just like you. It’s humanity’s anthem.

When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little boy.

Nature doesn’t see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That’s the beautiful simplicity of evolution. It matches design to environment.

For every perfect little town, there's something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.

I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.

Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades. Cut to the bone—pitch black.

Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.

Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding—truly understanding—how we experience it.

She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.

What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.

He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. To the earth...a million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

It's a troubling paradox -i have total control, but only to the extent i have control over myself.

I’ve found in my life that sometimes the best company is your own.

When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.

And we're not lost." We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.

I had extraordinary dreams, and an ordinary mind.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars.

Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. MARK TWAIN

It’s like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country.

I am not allowed to think I'm crazy. I am only allowed to solve this problem.

No one teaches you how to handle the death of a dream.

You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.

I know it’s crazy, but I’m holding tight to the idea that a small act of kindness can have real resonance.

You killed your ambition, didn’t you?” “It died of natural causes. Of neglect.

We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. —RAY CUMMINGS

Higher intelligence doesn't make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn't necessarily make you a good person.

This is best illustrated by looking up into the night sky at stars whose brilliance took fifty light-years to reach our eyes. Or five hundred. Or five billion. We’re not just looking into space, we’re looking back through time.

If you let fear take hold, if you let it own you, your life ceases to be your own.

Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse?

We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

His experience, there was darkness everywhere human beings gathered. The way of the world. Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades. Cut to the bone - pitch black.

My life is great. It’s just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been.” “You killed your ambition, didn’t you?” “It died of natural causes. Of neglect.

It occurs to me that if I do survive, I'll carry a new revelation with me for the rest of my days: we leave this life the way we enter it–totally alone, bereft.

There were moments when you saw the people you loved for who they really were, separate from the baggage of projection and shared histories. When you saw them with fresh eyes, as a stranger might, and caught the feeling of the first time you loved them. Before the tears and the armor chinks. When there was still the possibility of perfection.

Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions -- our idea of reality—are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses. We think we’re seeing the world as it really is, but… it’s all just shadows on the cave’s wall.

What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day. To be loved. To be expected. I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

It’s a strange thing, being the parent of a teenager. One thing to raise a little boy, another entirely when a person on the brink of adulthood looks to you for wisdom. I feel like I have little to give. I know there are fathers who see the world a certain way, with clarity and confidence, who know just what to say to their sons and daughters. But I’m not one of them. The older I get, the less I understand. I love my son. He means everything to me. And yet, I can’t escape the feeling that I’m failing him. Sending him off to the wolves with nothing but the crumbs of my uncertain perspective.

I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

I’ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I’ve just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it’s because of you.

Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat.

It all points to the fact that my identity isn’t binary. It’s multifaceted. And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isn’t just the inverse of who I am. It’s an infinitely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life between the extremes of me[.]

The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone. She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means -- not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.

There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in Western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion-a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d'etre. What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationship and happiness. And still, she wouldn't trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.

Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.

We perceive our environment in three dimensions, but we don’t actually live in a 3-D world. 3-D is static. A snapshot. We have to add a fourth dimension to begin to describe the nature of our existence. The 4-D tesseract doesn’t add a spatial dimension. It adds a temporal one. It adds time, a stream of 3-D cubes, representing space as it moves along time’s arrow. This is best illustrated by looking up into the night sky at stars whose brilliance took fifty light-years to reach our eyes. Or five hundred. Or five billion. We’re not just looking into space, we’re looking back through time. Our path through this 4-D spacetime is our worldline (reality), beginning with our birth and ending with our death. Four coordinates (x, y, z, and t [time]) locate a point within the tesseract. And we think it stops there, but that’s only true if every outcome is inevitable, if free will is an illusion, and our worldline is solitary. What if our worldline is just one of an infinite number of worldlines, some only slightly altered from the life we know, others drastically different? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe. What if that’s true? What if we live in a fifth-dimensional probability space? What if we actually inhabit the multiverse, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to equip us with a firewall that limits what we perceive to a single universe? One worldline. The one we choose, moment to moment. It makes sense if you think about it. We couldn’t possibly contend with simultaneously observing all possible realities at once. So how do we access this 5-D probability space? And if we could, where would it take us? —