Top 200 Blake Crouch Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. – GEORGE ORWELL, 1984.”

— Blake Crouch

2. “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?”

— Blake Crouch

3. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

4. “What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened. – T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton.”

— Blake Crouch

5. “Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live.”

— Blake Crouch

6. “Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.”

— Blake Crouch

7. “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

8. “We’re all made of the same thing – the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.”

— Blake Crouch

9. “My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

— Blake Crouch

10. “I’ve found in my life that sometimes the best company is your own.”

— Blake Crouch

11. “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

12. “For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.”

— Blake Crouch

13. “Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.”

— Blake Crouch

14. “If there are a million ponds out there, with versions of you and me living similar and different lives, there’s none better than right here, right now. I’m more sure of that than anything in the world.”

— Blake Crouch

15. “Most astrophysicists believe that the force holding stars and galaxies together – the thing that makes our whole universe work – comes from a theoretical substance we can’t measure or observe directly. Something they call dark matter. And this dark matter makes up most of the known universe.”

— Blake Crouch

16. “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?”

— Blake Crouch

17. “At this point, I’m not even sure what to be afraid of – this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head.”

— Blake Crouch

18. “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

19. “There are no rights anymore. No laws. Just force and fear.”

— Blake Crouch

20. “You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”

— Blake Crouch

21. “All the existential threats to our existence live under the umbrella of climate change.”

— Blake Crouch

22. “There’s a theory in the field of aesthetics called the uncanny valley. It holds that when something looks almost like a human being – a mannequin or humanlike robot – it creates revulsion in the observer, because the appearance is so close to human, yet just off enough to evoke a feeling of uncanniness, of something that is both familiar and alien.”

— Blake Crouch

23. “Without pain, there’s no beauty, Max. The beauty is worth the price.”

— Blake Crouch

24. “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

25. “He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is – one long goodbye to those we love.”

— Blake Crouch

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

29. “If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?”

— Blake Crouch

30. “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?”

— Blake Crouch

31. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

32. “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

33. “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 red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of 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.”

— Blake Crouch

34. “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

35. “I’m looking for a grain of sand on an infinite beach.”

— Blake Crouch

36. “The older I get, the less I understand.”

— Blake Crouch

37. “It’s like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country.”

— Blake Crouch

38. “If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding – truly understanding – how we experience it.”

— Blake Crouch

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

— Blake Crouch

40. “This is what I wanted to tell you: I wouldn’t change anything. I’m glad you came into my life when you did. I’m glad for the time we had.”

— Blake Crouch

41. “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre. Leonard Cohen.”

— Blake Crouch

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “You killed your ambition, didn’t you?” “It died of natural causes. Of neglect.”

— Blake Crouch

46. “I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.”

— Blake Crouch

47. “There’s something horribly lonely about a place that’s almost home.”

— Blake Crouch

48. “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?”

— Blake Crouch

49. “I am not allowed to think I’m crazy. I am only allowed to solve this problem.”

— Blake Crouch

50. “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.”

— Blake Crouch