Recursion Blake Crouch Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

My soul knows your soul. In any time.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We are homesick most for the places we have never known. —CARSON MCCULLERS

If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that?

Work is the only thing that makes her feel alive, and she’s wondered, on more than one occasion, if that means she’s broken.

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.

He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.

The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn't begrudge its visitation. He's lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.

This is what I wanted to tell you: I wouldn’t change anything. I’m glad you came into my life when you did. I’m glad for the time we had.

...everything seems scarier at night. It's just an illusion. A trick the darkness plays on us.

If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past.

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.

Each day is a revelation, every moment a gift. The simple act of sitting across the dinner table from his daughter and listening to her talk about her day feels like a pardon. How could he ever have taken even one second of it for granted?

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.

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.

I don't want to look back anymore. I'm ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They're both the same fucking thing.

She is forty- nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means - not just 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.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.

You really believe time is an illusion?” “More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.

We have made it far too easy to destroy ourselves.

We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.

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

memory is all he’s made of. All anything is made of.

Julia laughs—one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered—and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.

memory is our only true access to reality.

if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

I want to breathe the same air as you every minute of every day of my life. No matter how many timelines I live.

DMT is responsible for our dreams. But at the moment of death, the pineal gland releases a veritable flood of DMT. A going-out-of-business sale.

his consciousness like the needle in the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end.

Seek your happiness. You found it with me; which means it's attainable.

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 relationships and happiness.

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.

It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia—he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As

For so many lifetimes, he lived in a state of perpetual regret, returning obsessively and destructively to better times, to moments he wished he could change. Most of those lives he lived staring into the rearview mirror.

It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.

She's fifteen years younger, in her mid-thirties, and at six feet, four inches, the tallest woman he knows personally. With short blonde hair and Scandinavian features, she's not beautiful exactly, but regal. Often severe without trying. He once told her she has resting monarch face.

It's just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present and future. But we're intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this-when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missing me-it tortures us. Because I'm locked in my moment, and you're locked in yours.

How does one define a “simple” memory anyway? Is there even such a thing when it comes to the human condition? Consider the albatross that landed on the platform during her run this morning. It’s a mere flicker of thought in her mind that will one day be cast out into that wasteland of oblivion where forgotten memories die. And yet it contains the smell of the sea. The white, wet feathers of the bird glistening in the early sun. The pounding of her heart from the exertion of the run. The cold slide of sweat down her sides and the burn of it in her eyes. Her wondering in that moment where the bird considered home in the unending sameness of the sea. When every memory contains a universe, what does simple even mean?

I hope you'll go on without me and live an amazing life. Seek your happiness. You found it with me, which means it's attainable. If the world remembers, we did what we could, and if you feel alone at the end, Barry, know that I'm with you. Maybe not in your moment. But I am in this one. My heart.

And he wonders—is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

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.

That’s one of the great things about New York— no one cares about your emotional state as long as there’s no blood involved.

I don’t want to look back anymore. I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain.

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.

With no way out, no endgame in sight, and everyone she loves gone, she is unsure how much longer she will keep doing this.

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?

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

It's the realization that, as a deeply flawed species, we will never be ready to wield such power.

I’m ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They’re both the same fucking thing. 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.

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

——this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they're living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.

and 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.

Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile away, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago. It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is. But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.

six books that mean the world to her: On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Physica by Aristotle, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and two novels—Camus’s The Stranger, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Time is but memory in the making. - Vladimir Nabokov We are homesick most for the places we have never known. - Carson McCullers Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. - Ray Cummings He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell, 1984 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 Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. - Soren Kierkegaard

timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time. “I’m sorry, honey.” He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her. But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year. “This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?” She looks off camera, says, “What? Don’t be jealous. You’ll be watching this one day. You’ll carry the knowledge of every moment we spent together, all one hundred and forty-four years.” She looks back at the camera. “I need to tell you, Barry, that I couldn’t have made it this long without you. I couldn’t have kept trying to stop the inevitable. But we’re stopping today. As you know by now, I’ve lost the ability to map memory. Like Slade, I used the chair too many times. So I won’t be going back. And even if you returned to a point on the timeline where my consciousness was young and untraveled, there’s no guarantee you could convince me to build the chair. And to what end? We’ve tried everything. Physics, pharmacology, neurology. We even struck out with Slade. It’s time to admit we failed and let the world get on with destroying itself, which it seems so keen on doing.” Barry sees himself step into the frame and take a seat beside Helena. He puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him, her head on his chest. Such a surreal sensation to now remember that day when she decided to record a message for the Barry who would one day merge into his consciousness. “We have four years until doomsday.” “Four years, five months, eight days,” Barry-on-the-screen says. “But who’s counting?” “We’re going to spend that time together. You have those memories now. I hope they’re beautiful.” They are. Before her mind broke completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living. Helena was right. They were the best years of his lives too. “It’s odd,” she says. “You’re watching this right now, presumably four years from this moment, although I’m sure you’ll watch it before then to see my face and hear my voice after I’m gone.” It’s true. He did. “But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so,

white burgundy

The kind of breakthrough I’m looking for today doesn’t happen in the shallow end of the pool.

gin blossoms

One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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.

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.

resting monarch face.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Einstein said that about his friend Michele Besso. Lovely, isn’t it? I think he was right.

Diaz moved as though to get out. “No, ma’am,” Dox said, scoping the area. “Tell me where the phone is and you stay put. Just in case there are any unfriendlies in the area.” “Behind a book called Recursion, by Blake Crouch. Level three. Fiction.

We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction

The thought comes almost like a prayer—I don't want to look back anymore. I'm ready to accept that my existence will sometimes contain pain. No more trying to escape, either through nostalgia or a memory chair. They're both the same fucking thing.

She wipes away a tear. "All these years, I thought you wished you'd never met me. I thought you blamed me for ruining your life." "I was just hurting.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein said that about his friend Michelle Besso. Lovely, isn't it? I think he was right.

Throwing some money on the counter, he heads out into the night, trying to stay calm, but he’s reeling. 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?

KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

His father’s face watching the moment of totality is more impressive than the eclipse itself. How often do you witness your parents awestruck?

No matter how much we understand about how our perceptions work, ultimately we’ll never escape our limitations.

If we can’t rely on memory, our species will unravel.

Now’ is just an illusion, an accident of how our brains process reality

You want to talk about destructive? How about being locked in our little fishbowls, in this joke of an existence imposed on us by the limits of our primate senses? Life is suffering. But it doesn’t have to be. Why should you be forced to accept your daughter’s death when you can change it? Why shouldn’t a dying man go back to his youth with full wisdom and knowledge instead of gasping out his last hours in agony? Why let a tragedy unfold when you could go back and prevent it? What you’re defending isn’t reality—it’s a prison, a lie.” Slade looks at Helena. “You know this. You have to see this. You’ve ushered in a new age for humanity. One where we no longer have to suffer and die. Where we can experience so much. Trust me, your perspective changes when you’ve lived countless lives. You’ve allowed us to escape the limitations of our senses. You’ve saved us all. That’s your legacy.