Top 200 Blake Crouch Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn’t love this Julia – he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As.”

— Blake Crouch

152. “He watched the stars go dark as the sun breathed fire into the sky, and when it finally cleared the ridge on the far side of the river, he bathed in the rays of gorgeous warmth streaming into his alcove and toasting the frozen stone.”

— Blake Crouch

153. “The sun was gone, and in the wake of its passing, mountain ranges stood profiled against the evening sky like a misshapen saw blade. There was nothing to see of the pine forest a thousand feet below. Not a single speck of light anywhere that existed because of man.”

— Blake Crouch

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

— Blake Crouch

155. “Which is all to say maybe it’s just being alive at a baseball game on a fall day in the heart of her city.”

— Blake Crouch

156. “Because sometimes life is so rich and complicated and surprising that it takes your breath away.”

— Blake Crouch

157. “His experience, there was darkness everywhere human beings gathered.”

— Blake Crouch

158. “Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet above, nothing moving in this godforsaken town, and the mule skinner knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer’s mine, the Godsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be filling this box canyon with the thudding racket of the rock crushers pulverizing ore. The sound of the stamps in operation is the sound of money being made, and only two things will stop them – Christmas and tragedy.”

— Blake Crouch

159. “She is forty- nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means – not just physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.”

— Blake Crouch

160. “Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin. She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the anchors look scared.” Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television. “I got called up,” he said.”

— Blake Crouch

161. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

162. “The endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.”

— Blake Crouch

163. “They haven’t been unhappy these last few years, quite the opposite. But it’s been a long, long time since she felt that sense of giddy love that effervesces in the pit of your stomach and spectacularly upends the world.”

— Blake Crouch

164. “Money can’t buy you happiness, darling. Believe me, I’ve tried.” “But it affords your own brand of misery.”

— Blake Crouch

165. “She said, “Jerrod’s dead, and Scott’s hurt bad.” Wood creaked in a structure across the street. “Listen,” Lawrence said, “there’s a house up that slope, with a bay window in front. I want you to go there, hide inside, get out of the open.”

— Blake Crouch

166. “In the end, all we have is math.”

— Blake Crouch

167. “If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past.”

— Blake Crouch

168. “Is it possible to outthink yourself?”

— Blake Crouch

169. “If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that?”

— Blake Crouch

170. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

171. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

172. “In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies. I would think a former employee of the federal government could grasp that concept.”

— Blake Crouch

173. “What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.”

— Blake Crouch

174. “We are homesick most for the places we have never known. – CARSON MCCULLERS.”

— Blake Crouch

175. “Work is the only thing that makes her feel alive, and she’s wondered, on more than one occasion, if that means she’s broken.”

— Blake Crouch

176. “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.”

— Blake Crouch

177. “Knew she didn’t need another thing for the rest of her life except to be with him. There was such a peace that accompanied that knowledge.”

— Blake Crouch

178. “Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

— Blake Crouch

179. “It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good.”

— Blake Crouch

180. “The world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely.”

— Blake Crouch

181. “The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.”

— Blake Crouch

182. “I’m afraid, Riley. I think, therefore I fear.”

— Blake Crouch

183. “The vision I held for the future of us – no concrete idea of what that would even look like beyond the feeling of peace and hope.”

— Blake Crouch

184. “Is there a fate worse than being halfway evil?”

— Blake Crouch

185. “The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia, and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.”

— Blake Crouch

186. “Consciousness is a horror show. You search for glimpses of beauty to justify your existence.”

— Blake Crouch

187. “Mostly, I just sit by the kitchen window, watching the sea change.”

— Blake Crouch

188. “The multiverse exists because every choice we make creates a fork in the road, which leads into a parallel world.”

— Blake Crouch

189. “There’s no one else on this planet I would rather have ten thousand dinners with.”

— Blake Crouch

190. “We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.”

— Blake Crouch

191. “To save humanity, I needed my humanity.”

— Blake Crouch

192. “It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.”

— Blake Crouch

193. “You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.”

— Blake Crouch

194. “If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy – those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.”

— Blake Crouch

195. “What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationships and happiness.”

— Blake Crouch

196. “People with those kinds of ambitions – they aren’t like the rest of us. There’s a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.”

— Blake Crouch

197. “Feelings are also the core of compassion and empathy. We’re becoming capable of rationalizing anything. Maybe sentiment helps with the checks and balances.”

— Blake Crouch

198. “Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.”

— Blake Crouch

199. “Doesn’t feel like intelligence itself is the answer. It terrifies me to think of a world where we have all the same problems, a billion less friends, and everyone thinks they’re smart enough to be infallible.”

— Blake Crouch

200. “What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists.”

— Blake Crouch