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She shut the door, slid the seat forward, and slipped the same key that had opened the door into the ignition. If this were a movie, the car wouldn't start, she thought. The engine roared to life.
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Blake Crouch |
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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"
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Blake Crouch |
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his undergraduate degrees in English and creative writing from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, publishing his first two novels within five years of graduation. Since then he has published eight additional novels as well as multiple
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Blake Crouch |
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Most people who claim to be psychic are delusional.
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Blake Crouch |
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That's a bunch of garbage. All you need is a camera and film, because if you can't walk into a room and feel it in your bones, you're in the wrong business, wasting your time.
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Blake Crouch |
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Aside from each other, this box is the only constant we have. A very tiny boat in the middle of a very large ocean. It's our shelter. Our prison. Our home.
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Blake Crouch |
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Good." She smiles. "Then I'll postpone freaking out."
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Blake Crouch |
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I'm smiling on the inside.
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Blake Crouch |
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As I reach the front door, Daniela shouts, "Return bearing ice cream!" "Mint chocolate chip!" Charlie says. I lift my arm, raise my thumb. I don't look back. I don't say goodbye. And this moment slips past unnoticed. The end of everything I know, everything I love."
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Blake Crouch |
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He felt like the true translation of himself again.
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Blake Crouch |
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I paint my life with words.
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Blake Crouch |
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pantry, another a storage space for gas, bottled water, and a substantial coil of rope. Besides, I'd have heard him banging around in the dark. I walked out of his bedroom.
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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
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Blake Crouch |
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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 stars
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Blake Crouch |
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She takes another step back, reaches into her gray woolen cloak. The single-action army revolver is a heavy sidearm, and it sags comically in the child's hand, so she holds it like a rifle. Brady is too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with the hammer.
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Blake Crouch |
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and fully capable of taking you apart piece by piece. This is not about torture. It's about me knowing in my heart that you're telling the truth." "Isaiah, just listen."
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Blake Crouch |
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And it's the act of our observing the cat that kills it--or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. 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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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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colors and the picket-fenced lawns and the shoppes we spell the olde English way and the sweet smell of the river running through. Parking spaces are plentiful in the off-season. They choose a spot in front of the coffeehouse, climb out with their smiles intact, squinting against the high-altitude sun--a handsome couple just shy of forty, their fashionably-
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Blake Crouch |
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What if we actually inhabit the multiverse, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to equip us with a firewall that limits what we perceive to a single universe? One worldline. The one we choose, moment to moment. It makes sense if you think about it. We couldn't possibly contend with simultaneously observing all possible realities at once.
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Blake Crouch |
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Like standing on a beach as the tide sucks the sand beneath my feet back out to sea, I can feel my native world, and the reality that supports it, pulling away.
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Blake Crouch |
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pounds his gloved fist against the door, counts to sixty. The latch string hasn't been pulled in, and despite the circumstance,
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Blake Crouch |
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there's something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.
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Blake Crouch |
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I feel insanity stalking me again, threatening to curl me up fetal and shatter me into a million pieces. But I shit it down, returning to my new mantra. I am not allowed to think I'm crazy.
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Blake Crouch |
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F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
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Blake Crouch |
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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,
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Blake Crouch |
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Everything that can happen will happen. Everything.
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Blake Crouch |
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How much of the crew has been awakened?" "Only eight, counting us." They reach the automatic glass doors that open into the five-million-square-foot cavern that serves as a warehouse for provisions and building supplies. Affectionately called "the ark," it is one of the great feats of human engineering and ambition. A damp, mineralized smell pervades. Massive globe lights hang down from the ceiling, stretching back into the ark as far as th..
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Blake Crouch |
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bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see. The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean. Brady is a man at home in solitude, often spending days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all ..
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Blake Crouch |
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Life's short. Don't be mad. It's a waste of time.
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Blake Crouch |
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I whisper, "Now what?" And he says, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
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Blake Crouch |
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AMPOULES REMAINING: 1
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Blake Crouch |
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They had crossed the plains and made homes in these savage mountains and borne their myriad afflictions not because they were brave pioneers pursuing a dream. They had come for no other reason but that their ravenous hearts raged with greed.
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Blake Crouch |
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We 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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In a minute, we're going back into that corridor. We're the controls. Your words. Right?" "Yeah." "If that's the truth, if it's our emotional state that's somehow selecting these worlds, to what kind of a place is your rage and jealousy going to take us? You can't hold on to this energy as you open a new door. You have to find a way to let it go."
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Blake Crouch |
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stepped forward into the red darkness, squinting at the corners in the kitchen and the living room, straining to detect the slightest pin drop of sound--a noisy breath or a clamorous heart that pounded like mine.
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Blake Crouch |
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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 forming out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
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Blake Crouch |
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Whole Foods smells like the hippie I dated before Daniela--a tincture of fresh produce, ground coffee, and essential oils.
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Blake Crouch |
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We leave this life the same way we enter it-totally alone, bereft.
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Blake Crouch |
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wonder, Is this what God feels? The rush that comes from having literally spoken a world into existence? And yes, this world already existed, but I connected us to it.
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Blake Crouch |
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under the name Jack Kilborn. It's called Afraid, and I think it's one of the best pieces of horror fiction to come out in recent memory. HW: Work
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Blake Crouch |
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bottoms with snowflakes on them. I know, it's awful. HW: Misconceptions about people who graduated from UNC? BC: That if by
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Blake Crouch |
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She couldn't help thinking this didn't feel anything like she'd imagined it would. Having run countless versions of this moment through her head, they'd all carried more gravitas. She would scream at him. She'd hit him. They'd break down and cry together. He'd apologize. She'd accept. She wouldn't. Now she understood none of that would happen. They were just two people sharing a table, trying to limp through the awkwardness.
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Blake Crouch |
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Nothing exists. All is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you . . . And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. MARK TWAIN
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Blake Crouch |