Blake Crouch Quotes

Life's short. Don't be mad. It's a waste of time.

Pope smiled. "You're thinking all wrong, boy. There's no such thing as law or government inside this room. It's just you and me. I am the one and only authority in your little world, whose borders are these walls. I could kill you right now if I wanted to.

The search for meaning was the cornerstone of human disquiet

always puts me in mind of that F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. The

Do you have any concept of what I've already sacrificed for you?

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'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?

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.

She took me in when I was lost. When the world stopped making sense.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.' Albert Einstein

And the hair on his arms stood erect and some primal siren sounded in his brain, but mistaking terror for adrenaline, he walked down into the darkness because he'd never felt more alive.

There's something horribly lonely about a place that's almost home. From

A question repeated in the back of Theresa's mind as she washed the purple stains from her hands. How did they finally break you?

Was as close to human as he'd felt in

The man behind the divan stood up, the machine pistol quivering in his grasp. There was a flash, Abigail thinking he'd pulled the trigger, the walls of the sitting area lighting up, the snow glinting. It went dark again. Muffled thunder rolled through the basin, shook the chandelier, the weakened floor trembling beneath her feet.

My life is great. It's just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been." "You killed your ambition, didn't you?" "It died of natural causes. Of neglect.

I check the time on my drug-dealer flip phone, the one I bought to call Daniela in another Chicago. It won't make calls in this world---I guess minutes aren't transferable across the multiverse.

What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.

There is a part of me that never left that room in Fallujah that smelled like rancid blood.

Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat.

Next morning, Letty cabbed out to an IHOP in the xeriscaped burbs, several miles west of the glitz of the Strip. The emotion of the previous night still clung.

What I told you is the truth." "Really? You want to keep heading down that path? Because I went to the pub." Pope drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "They don't even have a female bartender on staff, and nobody saw you there four nights ago." "Somebody's lying." "So what I'm wondering is ... why'd you really come to

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. To the earth ... a million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. Michael Crichton

What it comes down to for me is that I'd rather us make bad decisions as a group, than to live in the absence of freedom.

scream until the drug took her. 5 They started arriving after four o'clock in the afternoon. By five, Rachael's disappearance was the lead story on all the local news stations, even in Tucson and Phoenix. When six rolled around, there were more cars parked along No-Water Lane than when the Hasslers had hosted their last Fourth of July barbecue. Come 7:15 P.M., more than forty people had crowded into Will and Rachael's modest adobe home in Ajo,

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.

Nature doesn't see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That's the beautiful simplicity of evolution. It matches design to environment.

That's not the way the human heart works. I can't just amputate what I feel.

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.

A sword and a shotgun lay across brackets in the wall, the rhinestones that covered them glittering under the overhanging lightbulb. Ethan startled

There were moments when you saw the people you loved for who they really were, separate from the baggage of projection and shared histories. When you saw them with fresh eyes, as a stranger might, and caught the feeling of the first time you loved them. Before the tears and the armor chinks. When there was still the possibility of perfection.

What am I missing, Abby?

Nurse Pam stood up.

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

I hate clowns!" "That's not a real clown," another boy said. "That's just some guy dressed up like a clown!

Letty had barely touched her food. Javier stared down at her through a pair of aviator sunglasses. "You forgot something," she said. "What's that?" "My name. Who will they be expecting?" "Selena Kitt. S-E-L-E-N-A K-I-T-T. But you won't be carrying any identification.

Several seconds of purchase.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we've treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars.

We're a part of something here, Mr. Burke. Something that matters. All of us." "Here's the thing, Marcus, and I don't want you to ever forget it. Nobody fucking asked me or anyone in that valley if we wanted to be a part of this.

I'm looking for a grain of sand on an infinite beach.

His experience, there was darkness everywhere human beings gathered.

Considering what he'd been through in the last five days, rote hallucinations would've been a welcome return to sanity.

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

Almost fifteen months he's been gone, and every day I wake up, I still don't believe this is really happening.

Run," Scott hissed. "They're coming.

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.

Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.

Jessica's smile makes Ron slide his hand over the console, let it work down between her blue-jeaned thighs.

Day'll come, when he's grown and it's too late, that you'd give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn't see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won't last, so you revel in it while it's here.

Actually, they're just as real as the one you and I are experiencing at this moment.

She took him by the hand and led him over

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?

Are we standing in a physical location?" "I think it's a manifestation of the mind as it attempts to visually explain something our brains haven't evolved to comprehend.

She loved at light-speed. No hesitation. No regrets. No conditions. No reservations. While he hoarded his chips and held a part of himself back, she went all in. Every time.

The sting and the shame of all he's put her through are still raw. He can't say for certain, but he suspects that if she'd done the same to him, he'd already be gone.

But I'll tell you what I do wish. Wish we could live twice, take a different path each time. That at the end of all this, when I finished serving God in the West, I could go back to that day on the beach, put a ring on Eleanor's finger instead.

Crazy hungry. Didn't even come up for air until she was halfway through and nearly choked when she did. Because that man was sitting across from her, smiling. It was a beautiful smile. Broad and bright. But there was something malicious and knowing in it that she couldn't quite put her finger on. Like the man wasn't smiling at her, but rather at something he knew about her.

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

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

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.

On my own, the ordinariness of the moment is almost too much to stand. I glance around the restaurant, taking in the faces of the waiters, the customers. Two dozen noisy conversations mixing into a kind of meaningless roar. I think, What if you people knew what I knew? -

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. The

Isaiah said, "I'll need access to Richter's phone for one hour. This is his replacement." "Does it work?" "No. It was impossible for Mark to replicate his contact list, apps, texts, call history. Safer play to swap it for a nonfunctioning phone. It'll power up and display a black screen. What I'm asking isn't easy. I need you to swap his current phone out for this one. Then you're going to have to hand off his phone to my contact at the club. He'll find you, so don't worry about that. Then you have to entertain Richter for an hour while my guy builds the clone. Then you have to switch his real phone back for the fake.

They say all art - whether books, music, or visual - is a reaction to other art,

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.

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

Fifteen years ago, before we met, Daniela was a comer to Chicago's art scene. She had a studio in Bucktown, showed her work in half-dozen galleries, and had just lined up her first solo exhibition in New York. Then came life. Me. Charlie. A bout of crippling postpartum depression. Derailment. Now she teaches private art lessons to middle-grade students.

Why would I seek out a world like that?" "Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works." Passing

been engaged not long ago, and it had

Shit. He was going to need a bigger gun. Not a problem.

Your sensitivity is overwhelming," Ethan said. "Someday remind me to explain to you what empathy is.

That prick's still your copyeditor?" "Yep. He's such a dick. He was giving me

Ethan didn't miss those things. Didn't wish that his son was growing up in a world where people stared at screens all day. Where communication had devolved into the tapping of tiny letters and humanity lived by and large for the endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.

If I represent the pinnacle of family success for all the Jason Dessens, Jason2 represents the professional and creative apex. We're opposite poles of the same man, and I suppose it isn't a coincidence that Jason2 sought out my life from the infinite possibilities available. Though

A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren't, you'll self-destruct.

If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That's how decent people justify bad behavior. In

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

He stopped listening an hour ago, when he discovered he could tune out completely as long as he interjected an "I hadn't thought of it that way" or "Hmm, interesting" every five minutes or so.

I know it's crazy, but I'm holding tight to the idea that a small act of kindness can have real resonance.

sharp edges of reality

I assumed that in this moment I'd be terrified of walking into a new world, but I'm not afraid at all.

I'm filled with a childlike excitement to see what comes next.

As long as my people are with me, I'm ready for anything.

could turn a phrase, slip in some subtext, make the reader really care. Desert Places will give you nightmares. But it will also move you in ways you didn't expect. How much do I admire his work? After I became a fan, I sought Blake out and we've worked together on several projects, with more planned for the future. If

I think he's trying to preserve our way of life." "For who? Us or him?

Kate stood next to Ethan with a shotgun of her

Don't you think about all you lost though? Isn't it thrown in your face here?" "Of course. Every day. But after absolute loss, it still continues." "What?" "You. Consciousness. There is life after hope, you know." The fire popped. "And what does that life look like?" "Not what you'd expect?" "No?" "You realize something," Matthew said. "What's that?" "That you go on. That you can take so much more pain than you think. We're built for it. It's almost like that's our purpose. We're vessels that exist to be filled with pain.

Perhaps once he had been a good clown. A noble clown. But he'd stolen Randall's chainsaw, and had to die.

Could a werewolf eat a baby whole, in one bite?" asked Anthony. "I suppose one could," Hollis said. Actually, he knew that one could. Firsthand. Heh heh. "So when it pooped out the baby, would the baby be a werepoopwolf?" "What if a werepoopwolf bit a werewolfwolfskunkdeer?" "It would be a werewolfwolfwolfpoopskunkdeer.

He figures she must contain a carbon core. A soul as hard as a diamond. So what happens when a diamond finally breaks?

Better to start off with the glad hand than a middle finger.

She studied the document. "Looks like a bunch of legalese." "Pretty much." "You wanna give me the CliffsNotes since I didn't go to law school?

What's the demographic?" "Men. Women. Children." "High-velocity GSWs?

Whole Foods smells like the hippie I dated before Daniela - a tincture of fresh produce, ground coffee, and essential oils. The

On the minus side, I'd been driving for six straight hours, and I was hungry, tired, and needed to pee. I also needed gas, according to my gauge. Maybe Murray could take care of all my needs. Assuming I could find Murray's before falling asleep, running out of fuel, starving to death, and wetting my pants.

The residence sat toward the back of the property, which sloped up across a masterfully landscaped yard shaded with maple and spruce trees, dotted with stone sculptures - fountains, birdbaths, angels - and not a leaf to be seen on the pockets of lush green grass. An engine turned over near the house. Letty stepped off the drive and crawled into a thicket of mountain laurel as a boxy Mercedes G-Class rolled past. Through the branches and tinted glass, she glimpsed Chase at the wheel, a young boy in a booster in the backseat. The car ride over had only intensified her nausea, and as the diesel engine faded away, she put her finger down her throat and retched in the leaves. She felt instantly better. Weaker. Less drunk. But better.

This low point isn't the book of your life. It's just a chapter.

Can't do this. There were tears in her voice now, her throat clogged with emotion.

Money can't buy you happiness, darling. Believe me, I've tried." "But it affords your own brand of misery.

I'm running a battery of tests, but everything appears to have come through fully preserved.

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. She

If I wanted to bring you down, David, I could've done that months ago." "If I wanted you dead, Agent Hassler - you and everyone you love - there is nothing in the world stopping me from making that happen. Not from prison. Not from the grave." "So we've established trust," Hassler said. "Perhaps. Or at the very least, assured mutual destruction." "No difference in my book.