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432331f
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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2dcade6
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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?
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Blake Crouch |
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97731e9
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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fbb724d
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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 red in ..
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Blake Crouch |
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177b76a
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I know everything feels hopeless to you in this moment, but this is just a moment, and moments pass.
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Blake Crouch |
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bdc4ce8
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All your life you're told you're unique. An individual. That no one on the planet is just like you. It's humanity's anthem.
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Blake Crouch |
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a65c6c4
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It's a strange thing, being the parent of a teenager. One thing to raise a little boy, another entirely when a person on the brink of adulthood looks to you for wisdom. I feel like I have little to give. I know there are fathers who see the world a certain way, with clarity and confidence, who know just what to say to their sons and daughters. But I'm not one of them. The older I get, the less I understand. I love my son. He means everythin..
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Blake Crouch |
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60af252
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Since the Industrial Revolution, we've treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars.
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Blake Crouch |
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4046dbe
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Because memory...is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together--a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it's the filter between us and reality. You think you're tasting this wine, hearing the words I'm saying, in the present, but there's no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps t..
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Blake Crouch |
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5762a20
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I know it's crazy, but I'm holding tight to the idea that a small act of kindness can have real resonance.
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Blake Crouch |
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99cb8e7
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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 Plexiglas.
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Blake Crouch |
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73ad654
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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9fce404
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And we're not lost." We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes."
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science
humor
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Blake Crouch |
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20c6716
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It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar--when the city sleeps but you don't, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.
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Blake Crouch |
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291684a
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You know, you remind me of my younger brother. I miss that kid, so much that I sometimes regret killing him.
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Blake Crouch |
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2e54a94
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Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to." "Why?" "Because they're the right things."
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Blake Crouch |
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b6c59d2
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Since the Industrial Revolution, we've treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren't rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.
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Blake Crouch |
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09c7c8e
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It's a troubling paradox -i have total control, but only to the extent i have control over myself.
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Blake Crouch |
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1aa9b18
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I think balance is for people who don't know why they're here.
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life-philosophy
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Blake Crouch |
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f7cef62
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He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. 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.
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Blake Crouch |
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a8f7e30
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If you let fear take hold, if you let it own you, your life ceases to be your own.
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Blake Crouch |
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c2db8ce
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What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.
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words
writing
imagination
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Blake Crouch |
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b0e82da
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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c0c52c4
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He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.
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Blake Crouch |
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981787c
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Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
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Blake Crouch |
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8b7b54f
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His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, "You spend time with your son?" "Much as I can," he'd answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. "It'll be your loss, Ethan. 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..
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Blake Crouch |
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47d5b5d
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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4ff2125
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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1a70df6
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Because no matter what had happened in the past, in this harrowing present, everybody needed everybody.
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Blake Crouch |
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6319a25
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That's what it is to be human--the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
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Blake Crouch |
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39c2dc8
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This low point isn't the book of your life. It's just a chapter.
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Blake Crouch |
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80a042b
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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0d08215
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In the world we came from, our existence was so easy. And so full of discontent because it was so easy. How do you find meaning when you're one of seven billion? When food, clothing, everything you need is just one Walmart away? When 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.
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Blake Crouch |
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8bd0eec
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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."
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Blake Crouch |
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ef35a0b
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They say all art--whether books, music, or visual--is a reaction to other art.
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Blake Crouch |
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7590647
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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28ce1ae
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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
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Blake Crouch |
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c96f680
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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64d0736
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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86014d4
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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?
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Blake Crouch |
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f0e30da
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deflating. Then empty. His diaphragm relaxed. He counted to three and squeezed the trigger. The British-made AWM bucked hard against his shoulder, the report dampened by the suppressor. Recovering from the recoil, he found his target in the sphere of magnification, still crouched on a flat-topped boulder on the floor of the canyon. Damn. He'd missed. It was a longer shot than he normally took, and so many
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Blake Crouch |
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846b1c0
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midmorning. The sky steel blue and not a cloud in sight. His perch was atop a thirty-foot guard tower that had been built on the rocky pinnacle of a mountain, far above the timberline. From the open platform, he had a panoramic view of the surrounding peaks, the canyon, the forest, and the town of Wayward Pines, which from four thousand feet above, was little more than a grid of intersecting streets, couched in a protected valley. His radio..
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Blake Crouch |
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4247821
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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4120f94
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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?
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Blake Crouch |