Blake Crouch

What if someone could rewrite your entire life?'My son has been erased.' Those are the last words the woman tells Barry Sutton, before she leaps from the Manhattan rooftop. Deeply unnerved, Barry begins to investigate her death, only to learn that this wasn't an isolated case. All across the country, people are waking up to lives different than the ones they fell asleep to. Are they suffering from False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious, new disease that afflicts people with vivid memories of a life they never lived? Or is something far more sinister behind the fracturing of reality all around him?Miles away, neuroscientist Helena Smith is developing a technology that allows us to preserve our most intense memories, and relive them. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent.Barry's search for the truth leads him on an impossible, astonishing journey, as he discovers that Helena's work has yielded a terrifying gift - the ability not just to preserve memories, but to remake them... at the risk of destroying what it means to be human.

Recursion

is this what you want? to do yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?

Gwenifer

His heart pounds in his ears. His mind races. It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar-

when the city sleeps but you don't, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity. Thinking about his father who died when he was young, and the enduring question-

Aistė

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.

... Being in her presence slashed through the dream-withdrawal; he didn't want her. It was a liberating revelation, even as it devastated him. Liberating because it meant he didn't love this Julia-he loved the person she used to be. Devastating because the woman who haunted his dreams was truly gone. As unreach-able as the dead.

The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone.

She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means-not just a 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.

When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past... 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.

A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Zachary Roberts

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. 

Recursion quotes

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