Recursion by Black Crouch

“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.” ― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.” ― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“Everything will look better in the morning. There will be hope again when the light returns. The despair is only an illusion, a trick the darkness plays.” ― Blake Crouch, Recursion

💡 “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 them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.” ― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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 be.” ― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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, Recursion

“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, Recursion