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You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. --C.S. Lewis
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Blake Crouch |
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Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone--while the morning sta..
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Blake Crouch |
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one of those twinges of surreal nostalgia that make you acutely aware of all the living you've done and how the choices you've made have led to this moment of introspection.
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Blake Crouch |
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felt the world reorienting itself around this new knowledge.
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Blake Crouch |
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To work here with a good heart I'd been forced to smother the snob in me.
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Blake Crouch |
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Because I see myself, first and foremost, as a man pursuing answers to fundamental questions. Now, if the people around me"--he gestures at his students who have begun to crowd in--"are sharp enough to absorb knowledge by sheer proximity to me...great. But the passing on of knowledge, as it were, doesn't interest me. All that matters is the science. The research."
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Blake Crouch |
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Sure, I flip people off in traffic on occasion, but that's just Chicago.
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Blake Crouch |
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So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there's an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes - a multiverse- where everything that can happen will happen
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Blake Crouch |
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He described a diabolical raspberry-chocolate souffle, but it was late,
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Blake Crouch |
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there's a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening--polarized and golden--that I can only describe as loss. Robert Frost's gold that cannot stay.
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Blake Crouch |
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If you find yourself in a fair fight, you obviously didn't plan right.
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Blake Crouch |
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What she felt toward him wasn't sadness or nostalgia or even love. It was beyond an emotion she could name. She thought of him now as light and time and energy--a being her earthbound soul could not begin to comprehend. Did he watch her now? she wondered. From some unfathomable dimension? She had the warmest inkling they would meet again as pure souls in the space between stars. They would communicate their essences to one another and lumin..
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Blake Crouch |
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He figures she must contain a carbon core. A soul as hard as a diamond. So what happens when a diamond finally breaks?
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Blake Crouch |
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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. Michael Crichton
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Blake Crouch |
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Pense que apreciaba cada momento, pero sentado aqui en el frio, se que di todo por sentado. ?Y como podria no haberlo hecho? Hasta que todo se cae, no tenemos idea de lo que realmente tenemos, de lo precaria y perfectamente que todo se mantiene unido.
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Blake Crouch |
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a little comb to brush her luxurious red hair.
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Blake Crouch |
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You're saying that, out of an infinite number of realities, I intentionally picked this shithole?
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Blake Crouch |
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She's cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.
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Blake Crouch |
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their density and depth, like they bore some great burden beyond the intake of the present.
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Blake Crouch |
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What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day. To be loved. To be expected. 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.
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Blake Crouch |
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Their affair had been three of the most intense, reckless, terrifying, happy, alive months of his life. Like how he imagined being on heroin felt if the high never ended, if every syringe didn't also contain the possibility of death. They'd been partners at the time, and there had been one week when they'd been on the road together in northern California. Every night, they rented two rooms. Every night, for five days, he stayed with her. Th..
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Blake Crouch |
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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."
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Blake Crouch |
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Is there a fate worse than being halfway evil?
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Blake Crouch |
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I don't want to spend the rest of my life wandering down this never-ending tunnel." "I won't let that happen." "How?" "I don't know yet." "But you're working on it?" "Yes. I'm working on it." "And we're not lost." We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes. "We're not lost." "Good." She smiles. "Then I'll postpone freaking out."
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Blake Crouch |
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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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A terrifying spin on the Prisoner's Dilemma that asks, Is it possible to outthink yourself?
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Blake Crouch |
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It's also the manifestation of everyone's existential question: Am I who I was supposed to be? Is this the life I was meant to be living?
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Blake Crouch |
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Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there's a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening--polarized and golden--that I can only describe as loss.
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Blake Crouch |
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You want to raffle me off? Like a fucking fruit basket?
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Blake Crouch |
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We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we're a part of a much larger and stranger reality that we can possibly imagine.
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Blake Crouch |
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We all live day to day completely oblivious to the face that we're a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.
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Blake Crouch |
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And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isn't just the inverse of who I am. It's an infintely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life between the extremes of me and Jason2.
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self-realization
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Blake Crouch |
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I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting her the 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.
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Blake Crouch |
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This is Daniela with an energy like the first time we met fifteen years ago, before years of life - the normalcy, the elation, the depression, the compromise - transformed her into the woman who now shares my bed: amazing mother, amazing wife, but fighting always against the whispers of what might have been. My Daniela carries a weight and distance in her eyes that scares me sometimes.
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Blake Crouch |
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Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system.
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Blake Crouch |
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Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precarously and perfectly it all hangs together.
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life-lessons
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Blake Crouch |
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She just witnessed her own murder.
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Blake Crouch |
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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I can only smile. When Daniela drinks, three things happen: her native accent begins to bleed through, she becomes belligerently kind, and she tends toward hyperbole. "Your father said to me one night--never forget it--that pure research is life-consuming. He said..." For a moment, and to my surprise, emotion overtakes her. Her eyes mist, and she shakes her head like she always does when she's about to cry. At the last second, she rallies, ..
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Blake Crouch |
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He says finally, "It's terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches into a new world."
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Blake Crouch |
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Because as fucked as everything is, there is no place I'd rather be than with this Daniela, this Charlie. If one tiny thing were different, they wouldn't be the people I love.
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Blake Crouch |
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She turned onto her side and faced Lawrence. His breath warmed her face, and in that virgin dark, she caught his scent--a repressed relic from those precious years when he was Daddy, and not the remnants of aftershave, no superficial mosaic of man-made chemicals, but his core, lifeblood odor, and it carried her back even further than the smell of cut grass and school-bus seats and snow cones.
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Blake Crouch |
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When you're a scientist, your late twenties are so critical. If you don't publish something big by thirty, they put you out to pasture.
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Blake Crouch |
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It's one thing to be lost in a world that's not your own. Another thing entirely to know you've been replaced in yours. That a better version of you has stepped into your life.
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Blake Crouch |