Pines Blake Crouch Quotes

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.

Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

They say all art—whether books, music, or visual—is a reaction to other art.

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.

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.” “Why?” “Because they’re the right things.

Because no matter what had happened in the past, in this harrowing present, everybody needed everybody.

YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT’S WHY IT’S CALLED THE PRESENT. WORK HARD, BE HAPPY, AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE IN WAYWARD PINES!

I think I finally understand why God went away and left the world to destroy itself.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies. I would think a former employee of the federal government could grasp that concept.

What it comes down to for me is that I’d rather us make bad decisions as a group, than to live in the absence of freedom.

His experience, there was darkness everywhere human beings gathered.

Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

A millennium without air or light pollution made for pitch-black skies. The stars didn’t just appear anymore. They exploded. Diamonds on black velvet. You couldn’t tear your eyes away.

In the world we came from, our existence was so easy. And so full of discontent because it was so easy. How do you find meaning when you’re one of seven billion? When food, clothing, everything you need is just one Walmart away? When we numb our minds to sleep on all manner of screens and HD entertainment, the meaning of life, of our existence and purpose, becomes lost.

deflating. Then empty. His diaphragm relaxed. He counted to three and squeezed the trigger. The British-made AWM bucked hard against his shoulder, the report dampened by the suppressor. Recovering from the recoil, he found his target in the sphere of magnification, still crouched on a flat-topped boulder on the floor of the canyon. Damn. He’d missed. It was a longer shot than he normally took, and so many

midmorning. The sky steel blue and not a cloud in sight. His perch was atop a thirty-foot guard tower that had been built on the rocky pinnacle of a mountain, far above the timberline. From the open platform, he had a panoramic view of the surrounding peaks, the canyon, the forest, and the town of Wayward Pines, which from four thousand feet above, was little more than a grid of intersecting streets, couched in a protected valley. His radio squeaked. He answered, “Mustin, over.” “Just had a fence strike in zone four, over.” “Stand by.

The sting and the shame of all he’s put her through are still raw. He can’t say for certain, but he suspects that if she’d done the same to him, he’d already be gone.

He also carried that whiff of unearned arrogance that seems to cling to those who crave authority for the sheer sake of power.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.

So we all embark wondering what lies over the horizon, what’s around the next bend. And isn’t that, in the end, what drives us?

In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies.

You are one ugly motherfucker.” Ethan chuckled. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist. It’s from a movie. Seriously, what the hell are you?

I have good intentions, but... But what? But all the time I fail. I hurt the ones I love.

How would one publish a living book, whose stories never ended?

When your world falls apart, cling to the familiar.

His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, “You spend time with your son?” “Much as I can,” he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. “It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.” Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he’s lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light—the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he’s missing—all the lost joy—perched like a boulder on his chest.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species.

pausing as the first radials of sunlight struck its translucent skin. Its progression down through the boulder field had been slow and careful, stopping occasionally to sniff the remains of others like it. Others Mustin

They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.

He watched the stars go dark as the sun breathed fire into the sky, and when it finally cleared the ridge on the far side of the river, he bathed in the rays of gorgeous warmth streaming into his alcove and toasting the frozen stone.

If I wanted to bring you down, David, I could’ve done that months ago.” “If I wanted you dead, Agent Hassler—you and everyone you love—there is nothing in the world stopping me from making that happen. Not from prison. Not from the grave.” “So we’ve established trust,” Hassler said. “Perhaps. Or at the very least, assured mutual destruction.” “No difference in my book.

The people in town, for the most part, can’t handle the truth of what’s out there. But you…you can’t handle the lie. The not knowing. You’re the first resident I’ve ever shared any of this with. Of course, it’s crushed your family to see the difficulty you’ve had.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” JOB

In the world we came from, our existence was so easy. And so full of discontent because it was so easy. How do you find meaning when you’re one of seven billion? When food, clothing, everything you need is just one Walmart away? When we numb our minds to sleep on all manner of screens and HD entertainment, the meaning of life.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in, or walling out.’ Robert Frost wrote that.

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

If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality. GIST)

The endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.

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.

He’d never hit a woman in his life, but as Pam moved in for more, he couldn’t shake the thought that it would feel so satisfying to connect his right elbow with this bitch’s jaw.

Like the first day of any new thing, it has been a long one, and he’s glad to see it end.

¿Estás perdiendo la cabeza? -Dímelo tú No puedo -¿Por qué? Porque yo soy tú

There are no rights anymore. No laws. Just force and fear.

On his first attempt to get up, his knees buckled and he sat down hard enough to send

When we numb our minds to sleep on all manner of screens and HD entertainment, the meaning of life, of our existence and purpose, becomes lost.

We’re a part of something here, Mr. Burke. Something that matters. All of us.” “Here’s the thing, Marcus, and I don’t want you to ever forget it. Nobody fucking asked me or anyone in that valley if we wanted to be a part of this.

understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

warm, the sky above a deep and cloudless cobalt. The man checked the pockets of his slacks, and then of his single-breasted coat. No wallet. No money clip. No ID. No keys. No phone. Just a small Swiss Army knife in one of the inner pockets. *

The sun was gone, and in the wake of its passing, mountain ranges stood profiled against the evening sky like a misshapen saw blade. There was nothing to see of the pine forest a thousand feet below. Not a single speck of light anywhere that existed because of man.

He came to lying on his back with sunlight pouring down into his face and the murmur of running water close by. There was a brilliant ache in his optic nerve, and a steady, painless throbbing at the base of his skull—the distant thunder of an approaching migraine. He rolled onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees.

was a brilliant ache in his optic nerve, and a steady, painless throbbing at the base of his skull—the distant thunder of an approaching migraine. He rolled onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter. His first deep breath felt like someone driving a steel wedge between the ribs high on his left side, but he groaned through

The old woman sat in her leather recliner, the footrest extended, a dinner tray on her lap. By candlelight, she turned the cards over, halfway through a game of Solitaire. Next door, her neighbors were being killed. She hummed quietly to herself. There was a jack of spades. She placed it under the queen of hearts in the middle column. Next a six of diamonds. It went under the seven of spades. Something crashed into her front door. She kept turning the cards over. Putting them in their right places. Two more blows. The door burst open. She looked up. The monster crawled inside, and when it saw her sitting in the chair, it growled. “I knew you were coming,” she said. “Didn’t think it’d take you quite so long.” Ten of clubs. Hmm. No home for this one yet. Back to the pile. The monster moved toward her. She stared into its small, black eyes. “Don’t you know it’s not polite to just walk into someone’s house without an invitation?” she asked. Her voice stopped it in its tracks. It tilted its head. Blood—from one of her neighbor’s no doubt—dripped off its chest onto the floor. Belinda put down the next card. “I’m afraid this is a one-player game,” she said, “and I don’t have any tea to offer you.” The monster opened its mouth and screeched a noise out of its throat like the squawk of a terrible bird. “That is not your inside voice,” Belinda snapped. The abby shrunk back a few steps. Belinda laid down the last card. “Ha!” She clapped. “I just won the game.” She gathered up the cards into a single deck, split it, then shuffled. “I could play Solitaire all day every day,” she said. “I’ve found in my life that sometimes the best company is your own.” A growl idled again in the monster’s throat. “You cut that right out!” she yelled. “I will not be spoken to that way in my own home.” The growl changed into something almost like a purr. “That’s better,” Belinda said as she dealt a new game. “I apologize for yelling. My temper sometimes gets the best of me.

sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter. His first deep breath felt like someone driving a steel wedge between the ribs high on his left side, but he groaned through the pain and forced his eyes to open. His left eye must have been badly swollen, because it seemed like he was staring through a slit. The greenest grass he’d ever seen—a forest of long, soft blades—ran down to the

Many did [believed in God]. Adopted moral codes. Created religions. Murdered in the names of gods they’d never seen or heard.

If there’s no species left to even perpetuate such an ideal [freedom and decision], what’s the point?

He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.

My God. Someone beat the shit out of me.

To be warm again lifted his spirits, and to be in the wilderness, despite everything, spoke to something buried deep in the pit of his soul.

Придет день, когда он повзрослеет, и будет уже поздно, и ты бы отдал целое королевство, только бы вернуться и хоть часок провести с сыном в детстве. Подержать его на руках. Почитать ему книгу. Покидаться мячом с человеком, в глазах которого ты безгрешен. Он еще не видит твоих промахов. Он смотрит на тебя с чистой любовью, и так будет не вечно, так что наслаждайся этим, пока оно есть

All the headlamps went dark except for Emmett’s. Abigail stood on the threshold, watching them explore the interior, the beam of Emmett’s light grazing the listing walls and a gnawed-board floor, littered with pieces of broken whiskey bottles, rusted tin-can scraps. The pine bar had toppled over and punched out a section of the back wall, through which the fog crept in, giving the saloon a natural smokiness.

Hmm. Something was off. It was flat, and aside from the faintest suggestion of bitterness in the finish, almost completely devoid of taste. He set the pint glass on the bar as Beverly returned. “I’m getting a free meal, so I’m hesitant to complain,” he said, “but something’s wrong with this beer.” “Really?” She gestured to the glass. “You mind?” “Go ahead.” She lifted the glass and took a sip, licked the foam off her upper lip as she set it back down. “Tastes fine to me.

Agent Evans is dead. Do you understand me?” “I’ll give him the message!” Marcy said brightly and hung up the phone.

Damn. He’d missed. It was a longer shot than he normally took, and so many variables in play, even under perfect conditions. Barometric pressure. Humidity. Air density. Barrel temperature. Even Coriolis effect—the rotation of the earth.

He opened the fridge. Strange. There were glass bottles of milk. Fresh veggies. A carton of eggs. Meat wrapped in butcher paper. But nothing prepackaged.

All he knows of Aashif is his voice and those brown, evil eyes in which he senses not a desire to learn information but to inflict pain. The guise of interrogation is merely foreplay. Something to get Aashif hard and wet.

Little patch of perfect green grass. The front porch under the shadow of an old pine tree. On the mailbox, a last name he didn’t recognize. He put his hands on the picket fence. It was dusk. Lights just beginning to wink on in the houses all around him. The occasional snippet of conversation sliding through a raised window. The valley silent and cooling and the highest elevations of the surrounding mountains catching the last bit of daylight.

The scream could only be compared to human suffering or terror. Like a hyena or a banshee. Coyotes at their maddest. The mythologized Rebel Yell. High and thin. Fragile. Terrible. And on some level, humming under the surface like buried electrical cables, was a dim awareness that this wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. Again, the scream. Closer. An alarm going off between his eyes, in the pit of his stomach: Leave this place now. Don’t think about it. Just. Go.

Pope shook his head and lifted something off the desk—a snow globe with a gold base. The miniature buildings under the glass dome became caught in a whirlwind of snow as he passed the globe back and forth between his hands.

How did you wind up in Wayward Pines?” “I was a rep for IBM. Came here on a sales call trying to outfit the local school’s computer lab with our Tandy 1000s.

Twenty-five-foot steel pylons spaced seventy-five feet apart. Bundles of conductors stretched between them, separated every ten feet with spacers. The cables an inch thick, studded with spikes and enwrapped with razor wire.

You made it past the fence, didn’t you? What did you see? What turned you into a true believer? I hear there are demons on the other side, but that’s just a fairytale, right?

It was the fakeness that killed her. The forced conversations about the weather. About the latest crop from the gardens. Why the milk was late. About everything surface and nothing real.

Ethan had been noticing it more and more—when the sun went behind the mountains, the cold sank almost instantly into town. An aggressiveness to the onset, which he found disturbing.

Some people, by nature, were better at surface conversation than others. Better at walking the line, steering clear of forbidden topics.

Your fatal flaw, Ethan, is that you’re under the mistaken impression that people are like you. That they have your courage, your fearlessness, your will. You and I are exceptions, cut from the same cloth. Even my people in the mountain struggle with the fear. But not you and me. We know the truth. We aren’t afraid to look it in the eye.

There's something wrong with this place.

You aren't crazy. They're just trying to make you think you are.

He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.” “By what?” “By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day. “Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

Have I ever done or said anything that would lead you to believe I would allow you to take my daughter away from me?

If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality. —Mark Roth, PhD (Cell Biologist)

I’m done living in a town where my son goes to school and I can’t know what he’s being taught. Do you know what they’re teaching him?” “No.” “And you’re fine with that?” “Of course not.” “So fucking do something about it.

The people in town, for the most part, can’t handle the truth of what’s out there. But you…you can’t handle the lie.

Ethan didn’t miss those things. Didn’t wish that his son was growing up in a world where people stared at screens all day. Where communication had devolved into the tapping of tiny letters and humanity lived by and large for the endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new email.

Ethan didn’t miss those things. Didn’t wish that his son was growing up in a world where people stared at screens all day. Where communication had devolved into the tapping of tiny letters and humanity lived by and large for the endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.

It will occur to him months from now that if this had been a movie, he wouldn’t have done it. Wouldn’t have sunk to the level of this monster. But the ugly truth is it never even crosses Ethan’s mind not to do it. And though he will continually dream about the crash, about all the things Aashif did to him, this moment will never haunt him. He will only wish it could have lasted longer.

He reached in, grabbed a bag of carrots and a small loaf of bread, crammed them down into the side pockets of his jeans.

The hurdler hit the sidewalk midstride and accelerated, dressed all in black, boots pounding the street. He carried a machete whose wet blade glimmered under the glancing beam of his headlamp, running hard, breathing hard.

Theresa wipes her face and turns away from the window.

At least there was another human being to share the weight of this crushing knowledge.