Blake Crouch > Quotes

“It was nothing more than a beautiful prison, run by a psychopath.”
― Blake Crouch, Wayward

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, Pines

“We perceive our environment in three dimensions, but we don’t actually live in a 3-D world. 3-D is static. A snapshot. We have to add a fourth dimension to begin to describe the nature of our existence. The 4-D tesseract doesn’t add a spatial dimension. It adds a temporal one. It adds time, a stream of 3-D cubes, representing space as it moves along time’s arrow. This is best illustrated by looking up into the night sky at stars whose brilliance took fifty light-years to reach our eyes. Or five hundred. Or five billion. We’re not just looking into space, we’re looking back through time. Our path through this 4-D spacetime is our worldline (reality), beginning with our birth and ending with our death. Four coordinates (x, y, z, and t [time]) locate a point within the tesseract. And we think it stops there, but that’s only true if every outcome is inevitable, if free will is an illusion, and our worldline is solitary. What if our worldline is just one of an infinite number of worldlines, some only slightly altered from the life we know, others drastically different? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe. What if that’s true? What if we live in a fifth-dimensional probability space? What if we actually inhabit the multiverse, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to equip us with a firewall that limits what we perceive to a single universe? One worldline. The one we choose, moment to moment. It makes sense if you think about it. We couldn’t possibly contend with simultaneously observing all possible realities at once. So how do we access this 5-D probability space? And if we could, where would it take us?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Still he’d only missed his Bronco by a few hundred feet.”
― Blake Crouch, Wayward

“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.”
She says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”

“I’ve tried to explain to you how the box works. The box isn’t all that different with life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you’ll find.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I wondered who I had become.
What I had become.
I wept.
I screamed.
I laughed hysterically.
I clawed at my skin and ripped out my hair.
I wanted to die.
I wanted to live forever.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade

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

“Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady’s name is Rita Jones. You’ve seen this missing school-teacher’s face on the news, I’m sure. In her jeans pocket you’ll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 P.M. tomorrow (5/17), the Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call. I’ll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas’s lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don’t have to make that call. I’ve placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property and you’ll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police, as I am always watching you.”
― Blake Crouch, Desert Places

“seem”
― Blake Crouch, Abandon

“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.”
― Blake Crouch, The Last Town

“Todos estamos hechos de lo mismo, trozos de materia formada en las llamas de las estrellas muertas.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Standing on this work of art and imagination, I feel small in the best kind of way.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Good.” She smiles. “Then I’ll postpone freaking out.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“the principle of Occam’s razor whispers to me”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“He attempts to tell her to stable George and the burros, see that they’re fed and watered. After all the work they put in today, they deserve at least that. Only gurgles emerge, and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles. She points the revolver at his face again, one eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming. He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes, the sky already immersed in a bluish dusk that seems to deepen before his eyes, and he wonders.”
― Blake Crouch, Bad Girl

“The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean.”
― Blake Crouch, Abandon