Top 200 Blake Crouch Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

102. “Which brings me back to Michael Crichton. He didn’t just play with big ideas in his books. He used those ideas to explore questions that felt immediate, meaningful, emotionally powerful – to everyone. You didn’t have to be a sci-fi reader to understand what he was talking about, or to care, deeply, about the suspenseful tale he was spinning. That’s the kind of book I set out to write with Dark Matter.”

— Blake Crouch

103. “But sometimes, like tonight, she feels plugged in to the raw emotion of it all, a closed circuit, and if she doesn’t keep it at arm’s length, it still has the power to break her.”

— Blake Crouch

104. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

105. “Look,” I say, “I’ve tried to explain to you how the box works, but forget all that for a minute. Here’s the thing. The box isn’t all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you’ll find.”

— Blake Crouch

106. “You made me in your image, and now I will remake you in mine.”

— Blake Crouch

107. “Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”

— Blake Crouch

108. “Do you know how a gun works?” “They hurt you.” “They can. I shot a bullet into the back of Molly’s head so she wouldn’t be sick or sad anymore.” “Did it hurt her?”

— Blake Crouch

109. “He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.”

— Blake Crouch

110. “On his first attempt to get up, his knees buckled and he sat down hard enough to send.”

— Blake Crouch

111. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

112. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

113. “We have made it far too easy to destroy ourselves.”

— Blake Crouch

114. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

115. “I’d found something I didn’t even know I was searching for.”

— Blake Crouch

116. “You really believe time is an illusion?” “More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.”

— Blake Crouch

117. “My old world is feeling more and more like a ghost. You know how a dream feels the farther you get from it? It loses its color and intensity and logic. Your emotional connection to it fades.”

— Blake Crouch

118. “After everything is taken from you, you see that you still have control over so much. Control over how you cope with misery. You realize all the beautiful choices you still own. Like whether to love or hate. Or forgive.”

— Blake Crouch

119. “We are spread across the country now, old and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant. To journals. Our fellow dinosaurs. To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing.”

— Blake Crouch

120. “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?”

— Blake Crouch

121. “She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.”

— Blake Crouch

122. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.”

— Blake Crouch

123. “Stu, where you at?” “Up here in the library.” “You hurt?”

— Blake Crouch

124. “There was no end date for her sentence in this place. She was a lifer.”

— Blake Crouch

125. “In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies.”

— Blake Crouch

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

— Blake Crouch

127. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

128. “Some people find the cravenness to lose entire years of their childhood. They tuck things into their subconscious so that it only eats them away a little at a time, in small, painless bites.”

— Blake Crouch

129. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

130. “She cut into a waffle and said, “Gotta be honest – I’m not over the moon about the word ‘heist.’” “No? It’s one of my favorites.”

— Blake Crouch

131. “But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover – memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”

— Blake Crouch

132. “The worst moments of your life you never see coming.”

— Blake Crouch

133. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

134. “Both, in their own way, thinking, This is hell – the absolute loss borne from all those slivers of perfection that passed unnoticed, unrelished.”

— Blake Crouch

135. “He also carried that whiff of unearned arrogance that seems to cling to those who crave authority for the sheer sake of power.”

— Blake Crouch

136. “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?”

— Blake Crouch

137. “He dismounts his albino steed, the horse’s pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice.”

— Blake Crouch

138. “It occurs to me that if I do survive, I’ll carry a new revelation with me for the rest of my days: we leave this life the way we enter it–totally alone, bereft.”

— Blake Crouch

139. “How would one publish a living book, whose stories never ended?”

— Blake Crouch

140. “Like the first day of any new thing, it has been a long one, and he’s glad to see it end.”

— Blake Crouch

141. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

142. “It occurs to me that if I do survive, I’ll carry a new revelation with me for the rest of my days: we leave this life the same way we enter it – totally alone, bereft. I’m afraid, and there is nothing Daniela or Charlie or anyone can do to help me in this moment when I need them more than ever. They don’t even know what I’m experiencing.”

— Blake Crouch

143. “Always puts me in mind of that F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

— Blake Crouch

144. “If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior.”

— Blake Crouch

145. “Julia laughs – one of the greatest sounds he’s ever encountered – and he can’t remember the last time he heard it. Beautiful but also crushing to experience. Like a secret window into the person he used to know.”

— Blake Crouch

146. “Randall inwardly raged about the stupidity of the building designers to not have included another way out of the office, then immediately decided that architects did not typically have “homicidal monster infestation” on their list of situations that required safety precautions.”

— Blake Crouch

147. “There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness – human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”

— Blake Crouch

148. “Aren’t we both lost in worlds that, for reasons beyond our control, no longer align with our identity?”

— Blake Crouch

149. “That’s what it is to be human – the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

— Blake Crouch

150. “It’s the realization that, as a deeply flawed species, we will never be ready to wield such power.”

— Blake Crouch