Justin Cronin Quotes

Someone once told me that part of you lives on so long as somebody remembers you.

The guy could sell sunlamps in a cancer ward.

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.

Our place had just four rooms and voices had a way of carrying, you couldn't sneeze in one room without somebody in another saying bless you.

But then night would fall, revealing the sky's hidden treasure - the stars, after all, weren't gone during the day, merely obscured - and his loneliness would recede, supplanted by the sense that the universe, for all its inscrutable vastness, was not a hard, indifferent place in which some things were alive and others not and all that happened was a kind of accident, governed by the cold hand of physical law, but a web of invisible threads in which everything was connected to everything else, including him.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

The grass was tall and parched, the limbs of the trees barren or else dotted with a few remaining leaves, the stragglers, bleached to the color of bone. They lifted in the breeze like waving hands, rustling like old paper.

Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels.

Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.

Because the game was the world's natural state. Because the game was war, it always was, and when wasn't there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ?

Nothing lasts forever." "Some things do." "What kind of things?" "The things we like to remember. The love we've felt for people.

I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.

To know and be known: that was the final desire, the heart of love.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

That was the heart of the matter. A new world was coming; a new world was already here. Maybe that was what getting older taught you, when you looked in the mirror and saw the passage of time in your face, when you looked at your sleeping daughter and saw the girl you once were and would never be again. The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren't, the things you'd done for love would be remembered.

He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more
a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.

So 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.

Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn't remember what you'd done to make it all happen.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

And isn't silence, in its way, a good sign? That everything is well, that the ship is still steaming safely away from shore?

There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present.

Lacey, you don't understand." He felt weightless, benumbed. He had nothing to fight with, not even a blade. "We're totally unarmed. I've seen what he can do." "There are weapons more powerful than guns and knives," the woman replied. Her face held no fear, only a sense of purpose. "It is time for you to see it." "See what?" "What you came to find," said Lacey. "The Passage.

In the past, when she'd looked at her reflection, she had still seen the little girl she'd once been; the woman in the mirror had still been an extension of her girlhood self. Now it was the future she saw. The wrinkles would deepen; her skin would sag; the lights of her eyes would dim. Her youth was fading, easing into the past.

Kittridge closed his eyes. So, the end. It would happen instantaneously, a painless departure, quicker than thought. he felt the presence of his body one last time: the taste of air in his lungs, the blood surging in his veins, the drumlike beating of his heart. The bomb was dropping toward them.
"I've got you," he said, hugging Tim fiercely; and again, over and over, so that the boy would be hearing these words. "I've got you, I've got you, I've got you, I've got you.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known.

It is an interesting truth that the human body, liberated from its head, is in essence a bag of blood with a built-in straw. Holding

From small mistakes come great catastrophes;

Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.

To have a child was to receive the gift of true immortality - not time stopped, as it had stopped in Amy, but time continuing and everlasting.

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?

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

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.

All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As

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.

Because that's what heaven is ... it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

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

The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.

Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone.

Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on.

There were people who were like this, the ones who could not be ruffled or else didn't show it, who possessed great internal reservoirs of calm.

The progress of her aging seemed to occur in fits and starts, not so much a matter of physical growth as a deepening self-possession, as if she were coming into ownership of her life.

She did not believe in fate; the world seemed far chancier than that, a series of mishaps and narrow escapes you somehow managed to survive until, one day, you didn't.

Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand - once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over.

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.

That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that.

That's the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You're just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.

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.

The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit.

Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.

The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt - a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn't been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else's baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.

All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us.

I've never stopped and never ever will. But the words got tangled up somewhere between his mouth and his brain, and the moment slipped away.

- I miss you, Daddy. I know you do. I miss you, too, sweetheart, more than you'll ever know. I don't think I've ever been happier than I was with you. I wish I could have saved you, Amy. - But you did. You saved me. You were just a little girl, alone in the world. I never should have let them take you. I tried, but not hard enough. That's the real test, you know. That's the true measure of a man's life. I was always too afraid. I hope you can forgive me. A

I should think it a wonderful thing to be missed, the way that I miss him.

I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose.

History is more than data, more than facts, more than science and scholarship. These things are merely the means to a greater end. History is a story - the story of ourselves. Where do we come from? How have we survived? How can we avoid the mistakes of the past? Do we matter, and if we do, what is our proper place upon the earth?

Wolgast recalled when he'd come down here with his friends to buy candy and comic books. Back then, a spinning wire rack had stood by the front door: Tales from the Crypt, Fantastic Four, the Dark Knight series, Wolgast's favorite.

I felt, driving home, that for the first time in many years, maybe ever, I was coming truly alive, and here's the thing: the problem of being alive is that it makes you frightened.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'.
"To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.

The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

Just ten minutes, but everything was different now. He was different, the world was different. His father was nowhere in it. And with that, tears came to his eyes.

They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.

her words, rather than functioning as a mere decoration of the experience, actually deepened its reality. It was the first time that I felt the power of language to intensify life. The

All things found their ends.

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

His father had always said, Son, the most important thing in life is to make a contribution. Who would have thought Kittridge's contribution would be video-blogging from the front lines of the apocalypse?

This isn't a question of odds. Of all the men in the world, that woman hose you. If she's still out there, she's waiting for you. Staying alive any way she can until you find her.

We made war on the planet, and the planet fought back.

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.

We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most

It's all well and good to save the human race. You could say I'm in favor. But you might want to pay a little more attention to what's right in front of you.

Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.

SIXTY-NINE She was Amy, and she was forever. She was one of Twelve and also the other, the one above and behind, the Zero. She was the Girl from Nowhere, the One Who Walked In, who lived a thousand years; Amy of Multitudes, the Girl with the Souls Inside Her. She was Amy. She was Amy. She was Amy. She

She was giving him a look. It took Eustace a second to figure out what it was. Her off-kilter gaze traveled the length of his body, then lingered pointedly. The gesture was supposed to be seductive but was more like livestock trying to sell itself.

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

But I did what I thought was right in the moment. In the end, that's all a man has to measure his life, and it's plenty.

Miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to ...

It's not that I don't believe you," Peter managed. "I'm sorry. It's just that ... it's only a story."
"Perhaps." She shrugged. "And perheps someday someone will say those very words about you, Peter. What do you say to that?

The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.

It's love that enslaves us.

The heart, once broken, stayed broken.

Absolution is not the same as understanding.

And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.

When he decided they weren't police, he realized he'd been thinking maybe they were.

I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

The field was carpeted with the most lustrous show of wildflowers she had ever seen - flowers by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. Purple irises. White lilies. Pink daisies. Yellow buttercups and red columbines and many others she knew no names for. A breeze had arisen; the sun had broken through the clouds. She shrugged off her pack and walked slowly forward. It was as if she were wading into a sea of pure color. The tips of her fingers brushed the petals of the flowers as she passed. They seemed to bow their heads in salutation, welcoming her into their embrace. In a trance of beauty, Amy moved among them. Corridors of golden sunshine fell over the field; far away, across the sea, a new age had begun.
Here she would make her garden. She would make her garden, and wait.

But she wasn't a little girl, she was a beautiful woman, tall and lovely, with tresses of black hair that curved like cupped hands around her face.

I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.

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

When they come, they come from above.