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Title: Recursion Authors: Blake Crouch Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 20 Date: 2025-03-11 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Life with a cheat code isnāt life. Our existence isnāt something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. Thatās what it is to be humanāthe beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
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.
Tags:existentialism,favorite,perception
āTime is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. Thereās no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. Itās all happening now.ā
Tags:metaphysics
We think weāre perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.ā
Tags:perception
It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiarāwhen the city sleeps but you donāt, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.
He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.
Tags:failing,favorite,fear,perception,stoic
When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the pastā¦All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
Tags:death,illusion,quantum_mechanics
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Tags:favorite,perspective,stoic
āI canāt go back and stop myself from being born. Someone else can, and then I become a dead memory. But thereās no grandfather paradox or any temporal paradox when it comes to the chair. Everything that happens, even if itās changed or undone, lives on in dead memories. Cause and effect are still alive and well.ā
He is always looking back, living more in memories than the present, often altering them to make them prettier. To make them perfect. Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol.
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
Tags:cognition,perspective,stoic
When sheās floating in the water, he looks down at her, says, āIāll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.ā āYou wonāt even recognize me.ā āMy soul knows your soul. In any time.ā
She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives. But she sees her father in this moment like she never has before.
Albert has taken to calling their group the Department of Undoing Particularly Awful Shit, and like many names that start as a bad joke without a quick replacement, the name sticks.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
Thatās one of the great things about New Yorkāno one cares about your emotional state as long as thereās no blood involved.
āThat consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitionsāour idea of realityāare shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.
āThe kind of breakthrough Iām looking for today doesnāt happen in the shallow end of the pool.ā
Tags:difficulty,problem_solving,progress
āIf 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? This is why weāre seeing an epidemic of suicides.ā
Tags:memory,past,present,truth
The timeline heās on is the original, and heās accelerating upstream against the river of his life, crashing through forgotten moments, understanding finally that memory is all heās made of. All anything is made of.
Tags:memory,metaphysics,scifi