Quotes by Blake Crouch

And were not lost.We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.

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

The box isnt all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what youll find.

The search for meaning was the cornerstone of human disquiet.

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 isnt the mother of my son, she isnt my wife, we havent 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 its the same arrangement of matter--same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste...It isnt married-people lovemaking that follows. We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.

When you were a child, I didnt tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.

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

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

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. Theres 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. Its the beautiful thing about youth.Theres 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 havent felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

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.

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.

Suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesnt lead to truth.

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

Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.”“Dee—”I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”“You have a daughter, too. You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit.

Ive seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But its all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when youre in it, its all just day-to-day, right? And isnt that what you have to make your peace with?

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 someones little boy.

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

“Its 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 were 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 Im locked in my moment, and youre locked in yours.”

“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, hes looking back in time.”