Justin Cronin Quotes

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

~ Justin Cronin

In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.

~ Justin Cronin

For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.

~ Justin Cronin

I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others.

~ Justin Cronin

Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitude. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.

~ Justin Cronin

How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words.

~ Justin Cronin

The memory was unpleasant; he'd taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.

~ Justin Cronin

I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. Kill is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died.

~ Justin Cronin

The heart, once broken, stayed broken.

~ Justin Cronin

The world had a way of speaking to you if you let it, the trick was learning to hear.

~ Justin Cronin

It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust.

~ Justin Cronin

She thought she should take a moment to pray. But, as she was holding a loaded rifle, conventional prayer did not seem entirely suitable. Sister Peg hoped that God would help her, but it was her belief that He much preferred for people to attend to themselves. Life was a test; it was up to you to pass it or not. She raised the gun to her clavicle and angled one eye down the length of the barrel.

~ Justin Cronin

What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.

~ Justin Cronin

It was as if I'd lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be dine about it.

~ Justin Cronin

It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.

~ Justin Cronin

All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.

~ Justin Cronin

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

~ Justin Cronin

The restraints were nothing, like paper. The rivets popped from the table and shot across the room. First his arms and then his legs. The room was dark but hid nothing from his eyes, because the darkness was part of him now. And inside him, far down, a great devouring hunger uncoiled itself. To eat the very world. To take it all inside him and be filled by it, made whole. To make the world eternal, as he was.

~ Justin Cronin

Behind every great hatred is a love story. For I am a man who has known and tasted love. I say “a man” because that is how I know myself. Look at me, and what do you see? Do I not take the form of a man? Do I not feel as you do, suffer as you do, love as you do, mourn as you do? What is the essence of a man, if not these things?

~ Justin Cronin

Last night they came again. The soldiers had set up a defense perimeter, but there were simply too many—they must have come by the hundreds of thousands, a huge swarm that blotted out the stars. Three soldiers killed, as well as Cole. He was standing right in front of me; they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury.

~ Justin Cronin

Absolution is not the same as understanding.

~ Justin Cronin

For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell

~ Justin Cronin

City of memories, city of mirrors.

~ Justin Cronin

His son's transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

~ Justin Cronin

For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing but his parent’s lives are changing too. Like a habitat, abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are. For 18 years he has experienced their existence only in so far as it is related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he's not around? What secrets do they hold from each other? What aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances held in check by the shared project of child rearing will now in his absence, lurch into the light?

~ Justin Cronin

Below lies the dark core, that great iron ball beneath all things. Its compressed weight is fantastic; it is older than time itself. It is a vestige of the blackness that predates all existence, when a formless universe existed in a state of chaotic un-creation, lacking awareness even of itself.

~ Justin Cronin

The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain’t you pretty, ain’t you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass............Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. Your old life ended, and the train took you away to another...

~ Justin Cronin

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.

~ Justin Cronin

What is home but a place where you are truly known?

~ Justin Cronin

So, at the last, a story.

~ Justin Cronin

Behind every great hatred is a love story.

~ Justin Cronin

Never a good sign, he thought, when the crows showed up.

~ Justin Cronin

And then, despite all these concerns, Arnette felt her mind begin to loosen, the images of the day unwinding inside her like a spool of thread, pulling her down into sleep.

~ Justin Cronin

It was like leading people to the edge of a cliff, showing them the view, and then shoving them off.

~ Justin Cronin

Would somebody please tell him whose idea it had been to kill the entire state of Colorado?

~ Justin Cronin

I like cats as much as the next person, in the right quantity.

~ Justin Cronin

But I suppose it's part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one's left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it's like I've got so many people inside of me I'm never alone at all. And when I go, I'll be taking them with me.

~ Justin Cronin

Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step.

~ Justin Cronin

Perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

~ Justin Cronin

You are Entering the Red Zone.Proceed at Own Risk.When in Doubt Run.

~ Justin Cronin