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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“It's terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches off into a new world.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“As long as I'm with you, I know exactly who I am.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I know everything feels hopeless to you in this moment, but this is just a moment, and moments pass.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“The box isn't all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you'll find.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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?”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, The Last Town

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

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

“Is it possible to outthink yourself?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion