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Title: Dark Matter Authors: Blake Crouch Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 20 Date: 2023-07-09 Last Highlighted: **


Highlights

ā€œWhen you write something, you focus your full attention on it. Itā€™s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.ā€

Tags:favorite,writing,ideas


Nothing exists. All is a dream. Godā€”manā€”the worldā€”the sun, the moon, the wilderness of starsā€”a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty spaceā€”and youā€¦. And you are not youā€”you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought.

Tags:favorite,perception


Weā€™re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

Tags:perception,favorite


Itā€™s the beautiful thing about youth. Thereā€™s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

Tags:potential,youth


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.

Tags:reality,physics,quantum_mechanics


And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isnā€™t just the inverse of who I am. Itā€™s an infinitely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life between the extremes of me and Jason2.

Tags:favorite,science,perspective,self-care


Iā€™ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. Weā€™re all made of the same thingā€”the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. Iā€™ve just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And itā€™s because of you.


Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

Tags:perspective,present


ā€œIā€™ve seen so many versions of you. Without me. Graphic designer. But itā€™s all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when youā€™re in it, itā€™s all just day-to-day, right? And isnā€™t that what you have to make your peace with?ā€

Tags:favorite,perception


ā€œWe all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that weā€™re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.ā€

Tags:reality,life


Most astrophysicists believe that the force holding stars and galaxies togetherā€”the thing that makes our whole universe workā€”comes from a theoretical substance we canā€™t measure or observe directly. Something they call dark matter. And this dark matter makes up most of the known universe.ā€


One of the things I love most about Daniela is her honesty. She has a direct link hardwired from her heart to her mouth. No filter, no self-revision. She says what she feels, without a shred of guile or cunning. She works no angles.


Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.


I canā€™t help thinking that weā€™re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.


The box isnā€™t all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what youā€™ll find.ā€


ā€œIf there are a million ponds out there, with versions of you and me living similar and different lives, thereā€™s none better than right here, right now. Iā€™m more sure of that than anything in the world.ā€


All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.


My understanding of identity has been shatteredā€”I am one facet of an infinitely faceted being called Jason Dessen who has made every possible choice and lived every life imaginable.


No one tells you itā€™s all about to change, to be taken away. Thereā€™s no proximity alert, no indication that youā€™re standing on the precipice. And maybe thatā€™s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when youā€™re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.


Lately, their family dinner conversations have centered around ideas, books, and articles Jason is reading, and Charlieā€™s studies, instead of a mundane recounting of the dayā€™s events.