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eeaf7ad
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I've always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing--the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I've just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it's because of you.
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Blake Crouch |
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e83af55
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Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There's no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It's all happening now.
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Blake Crouch |
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faf5a29
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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3202b9f
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The owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour. "Jessup? It's Brady! You in back?" The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year. "What the hell?" he whispers. When..
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Blake Crouch |
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fcc86f6
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My reality--more and more every day--is this world. Where I have nothing. Where I'm a homeless, filthy creature whose existence evokes only compassion, pity, and disgust. Nearby, another homeless man is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, having a full-volume conversation with nobody. I think, Am I so different? Aren't we both lost in worlds that, for reasons beyond our control, no longer align with our identity?
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Blake Crouch |
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970363b
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I think I finally understand why God went away and left the world to destroy itself.
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Blake Crouch |
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4273593
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You killed your ambition, didn't you?" "It died of natural causes. Of neglect."
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Blake Crouch |
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f502f39
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At this point, I'm not even sure what to be afraid of--this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head.
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Blake Crouch |
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e0f8efd
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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497bf01
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It had been over fives years since they'd last been together. They talked and held one another and cried, all knowing in the back of their minds that they could sit on this bed for twenty years, for fifty, but it wouldn't matter. There would be no real catching up, no recovery of lost time, no understanding of the damage the separation had caused. They were different people now--haunted, ridden with scars and nightmares. There was no going ..
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Blake Crouch |
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6cffd64
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YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED THE PRESENT. WORK HARD, BE HAPPY, AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE IN WAYWARD PINES!
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Blake Crouch |
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cbf306e
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I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son. I still do.
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love
parents
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Blake Crouch |
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0b032a5
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When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.
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parents
warnings
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Blake Crouch |
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3cb63b3
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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 |
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0ecff01
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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5b18bd4
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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." --
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Blake Crouch |
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ee89103
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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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ca44e27
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I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. 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..
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fall
memory
night
smell
walks
youth
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Blake Crouch |
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fb9edd1
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I am not allowed to think I'm crazy. I am only allowed to solve this problem.
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Blake Crouch |
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aea7d46
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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?
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memory
reality
truth
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Blake Crouch |
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91ec2c9
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The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. "Go away, you goddamn clown!" Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five...ten...fifteen...then... That's not a handkerchief."
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dracula
horror
magic
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Blake Crouch |
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119f5d1
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My soul knows your soul. In any time.
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Blake Crouch |
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e1aaad4
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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1874be0
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The old woman sat in her leather recliner, the footrest extended, a dinner tray on her lap. By candlelight, she turned the cards over, halfway through a game of Solitaire. Next door, her neighbors were being killed. She hummed quietly to herself. There was a jack of spades. She placed it under the queen of hearts in the middle column. Next a six of diamonds. It went under the seven of spades. Something crashed into her front door. She kept ..
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Blake Crouch |
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f6abb77
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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."
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Blake Crouch |
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c2a01b2
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A millennium without air or light pollution made for pitch-black skies. The stars didn't just appear anymore. They exploded. Diamonds on black velvet. You couldn't tear your eyes away.
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Blake Crouch |
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3f251db
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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"
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Blake Crouch |
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fa789cd
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If you go in with fear, fear is what you'll find.
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Blake Crouch |
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59630c1
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I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window. Eyes you can fall into and keep falling. She isn't the mother of my son, she isn't my wife, we haven't made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not jsut the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it's the same arrangement of ma..
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love
mate
partner
sex
wife
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Blake Crouch |
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7f83b17
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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
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Blake Crouch |
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8ca0a92
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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b0d5cb0
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When your world falls apart, cling to the familiar.
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Blake Crouch |
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e23d5f8
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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9b9dfa8
|
Are you with them?" he whispered again. "With who?" Abigail asked. "The men in masks. There were--Get back!" he yelled and Abigail saw the machine pistol shift to her father."
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Blake Crouch |
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5d77223
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His experience, there was darkness everywhere human beings gathered.
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Blake Crouch |
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660a422
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In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion-a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d'etre. 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 relationship and happiness. And still, she wouldn't trade it. This is the only person she knows how to..
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life-lessons
passions
purpose
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Blake Crouch |
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adbe6e8
|
If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding--truly understanding--how we experience it.
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Blake Crouch |
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63876c2
|
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. --GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
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Blake Crouch |
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9e78d68
|
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.
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Blake Crouch |
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12a53b8
|
If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That's how decent people justify bad behavior.
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Blake Crouch |
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026a7d0
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What if our worldline is just one of an infinite number of worldlines, some only slightly altered from the life we know, others drastically different? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe. What if that's true? What if we live in a fifth..
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Blake Crouch |
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b86bd8f
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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.
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Blake Crouch |
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371a035
|
was a brilliant ache in his optic nerve, and a steady, painless throbbing at the base of his skull--the distant thunder of an approaching migraine. He rolled onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter. His first deep breath felt like someone driving a steel wedge between the ribs high o..
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Blake Crouch |
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ff77e45
|
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?
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Blake Crouch |