Best 35 quotes of Blake Crouch on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

Nature doesn't see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That is the simplicity of evolution, matching design to environment.

Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.

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?

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 infintely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life between the extremes of me and Jason2.

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

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.

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.

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.... Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time.... Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others.

He curled up, twitching and spasming, the pain stormtrooping through his entire body in agonizing, dizzying, pounding waves. He vomited, but it wasn’t the contents of his stomach. It was his stomach, hanging inside-out from a slimy loop of esophagus, spilling out the precious blood he’d been digesting. Even with everything going on, the smell of blood activated his biting reflex, and he chomped down on his own regurgitated organs, screaming as he chewed.

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.

I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son. I still do.

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.

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.

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. 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 in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o 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. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

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

I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window. Eyes you can fall into and keep falling. She isn't the mother of my son, she isn't my wife, we haven't made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not jsut the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it's the same arrangement of matter--same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste... It isn't married-people lovemaking that follows. We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.

I suppose we're both just trying to come to terms with how horrifying infinity really is.

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[.]

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Long legs and longer arms, each tipped with a row of black talons. Sinewy. Wiry. And above all, humanoid, its skin in the sunlight as translucent as a baby mouse’s—mapped with a network of blue veins and purple arteries and even its heart faintly visible as a pinkish throb just right of center mass. snarling as strings of bloody saliva dangled from the corners of its lipless mouth, creamy eyes hard-focused on its target.

Perfection all the time would drive them mad. For every perfect little town, there's something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.

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

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

The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. “Go away, you goddamn clown!” Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five…ten…fifteen…then… That’s not a handkerchief.

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

We leave this life the same way that we enter it, totally alone, bereft.

When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.

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?