Cronin Quotes

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. ~ Justin Cronin

What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age? ~ Justin Cronin

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. ~ Justin Cronin

The world tomorrow is haunted
only by what doesn't happen
now. ~ M.T.C. Cronin

Absolution is not the same as understanding. ~ Justin Cronin

Hell is the place where one has ceased to hope. ~ A.J. 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 multitudes. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. We may have loved, but never well enough. We never truly knew ourselves. We forgot the world; now it has forgotten us. How ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

Every time I pass him he gives me the excommunication stare. ~ A.J. Cronin

All things passed away. Even the earth itself, the sky and the river and the stars he loved, would, one day, come to the end of their existence. But it was not a thing to be feared; such was the bittersweet beauty of life. He ~ Justin Cronin

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

It's love that enslaves us. ~ Justin Cronin

There's a power at work here, something beyond our understanding. You can call it what you like. It doesn't need a name, because it knows yours, my friend. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write. ~ Doreen Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

Tell me dear, what do you know about prescribing atypical antipsychotics to enchance the effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors? ~ Sherrie 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

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

[ ... ]and yet wasn't there something about [vampires] that struck a deep chord of recognition, even of memory? The teeth, the blood, the hunger, the immortal union with darkness
what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? ~ Justin Cronin

Right. You never know...but you usually do. ~ Ali Cronin

On a fading summer evening, late in the last hours of his old life, Peter Jaxon - son of Demetrius and Prudence Jaxon, First Family; descendent of Terrence Jaxon, signatory of the One Law; great-great-nephew of the one known as Auntie, Last of the First; Peter of Souls, the Man of Days and the One Who Stood - took his position on the catwalk above Main Gate, waiting to kill his brother. ~ Justin Cronin

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 ... ~ Justin Cronin

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.
And then, of course, the end of the world happened. ~ Justin Cronin

I used to pull rank and wait until the wind was blowing out. ~ Joe 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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

The big man shrugged, "I don't know. You're pretty good with the cards. Tell me what the odds are."
[She] shifted her gaze to Michael, then back at Hollis. "This isn't a question of odds. Of all the men in the world, that woman chose you. If she's still out there, she's waiting for you. Staying alive any way she can until you find her. That's all that matters."
Everybody waited for what Hollis would next say. "You're a real ball-buster, you know that? ... Let me pack a few things. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

Flash Floods are about as predictable as a crazy dream after one too many fish tacos - one minutes you're fine, and the next minute a moose is floating past you wearing a fishing hat and ladies' pajamas. ~ Doreen Cronin

I was very much a child of the Cold War. ~ Justin Cronin

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

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

There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another - a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams. ~ Justin Cronin

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

little-known fact, though not unacknowledged by my scientist's eye, is that the ceiling of Grand Central is actually backward. It is a mirror image of the night sky; lore holds that the artist was working from a medieval manuscript that showed the heavens not from within but from without - not mankind's view but God's. I ~ Justin Cronin

But as love turns to grief, and grief becomes anger, so must anger yield to thought, in order to know itself. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time. ~ James Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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

You are very attractive. And your greatest charm is that you do not realise it! ~ A.J. Cronin

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

I wanted to be a police officer for a long time so I could be just like my dad! ~ Doreen Cronin

Weren't the question the man had wrong, it was his way of asking it. ~ Justin Cronin

I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison. ~ James 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

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? ~ Justin Cronin

It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

They will never believe that an ordinary girl could do such an extraordinary thing,' Genevieve worried. 'What would I tell them?
'Tell them there is no such thing as an ordinary girl, said Bloom. ~ Doreen Cronin

He had always believed himself to be a flimsy man, a chip in the current of life. But since the birth of his son, and the burst of love this had produced, he had discovered within himself a solidity of character he had never thought possible, an expanding sense of life's importance and his place within its web. He wanted to be a man of whom it could be said that he had put others before himself and died in their defense. Thus the newly inducted and personally transformed Private Jock Alvado shoved his terror aside, stepped over the rail, and turned his back on the maw of space below him; Peter and Apgar did the same. They jumped. ~ Justin Cronin

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

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation. ~ Justin Cronin

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

Doubt is human nature. It's what we do with it that matters. ~ Justin Cronin

It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained
they all swirled together in the mind like a soup. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

All was a ruin, yet the world did not seem to know or care. In ~ Justin Cronin

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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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

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? ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

From every work without leisure, Jack becomes a dull boy. ~ A.J.Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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

Wolgast leaned back in his chair and realized how exhausted he was. It always came upon him like this, like the sudden unclenching of a fist. ~ Justin Cronin

The long-lived K meson was discovered at Brookhaven. ~ James 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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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 ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

Above all am I convinced of the need, irrevocable and inescapable, of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God. ~ A.J. Cronin

I should be exhausted, but I'm not. I'm much too keyed up to sleep. Probably it's myour imagination, but when I close my eyes and sit very still, I swear I can feel the baby inside me. Not moving, nothing like that, it's far too early. Just a kind of warm and hopeful presence, this new soul my body carries, waiting to be born into the world. I feel ... what's the word?
Happy. I feel happy.
Shots outside. I am going to look.
*****END OF DOCUMENT*****
Recovered at Roswell Site ("Roswell Massacre") ~ Justin Cronin

Too many what-ifs are just a way to keep yourself up at night, and there's not enough decent sleep to go around. ~ Justin Cronin

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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

In mouth honey, and in heart resentment. ~ A.J.Cronin

I always stumble awkwardly with my clumsy tongue. ~ A.J. Cronin

This is a writ of commutation, Anthony, signed by Governor Jenna Bush. ~ Justin Cronin

The music comes first, like, 99 percent of the time. I come up with the basic chord structure and the melody first and then I get really obsessed with arranging, adding, and subtracting parts. The last step of the process, for me, is finding words that fit into that structure and figuring out exactly what I want to talk about. ~ Mikal Cronin

From small mistakes come great catastrophes; ~ Justin Cronin

Because the world was not the world, that was the thing, that was the terrible truth he had discovered. It was a dream world, a veil of light and sound and matter that the real world hid behind. Walkers in a dream of death, that's what they were, and the dreamer was the girl, this Girl from Nowhere. The world was a dream and she was dreaming them! ~ Justin Cronin

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. ~ Justin Cronin

They always come home. ~ Justin Cronin

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

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. ~ Justin Cronin

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

Look into words for the tomb of space
where beauties & stones & eternities untangle.
( ... )
In them is the flood which bothers the sea
and the songs which need no music.
Say these words that evolve into silence,
whose language survives not being understood.
Pronounce those which are unpalatable &
untangle from all the world wants to hear. ~ M.T.C. Cronin

The virtue of achievement is victory over oneself. Those who know this can never know defeat. ~ A.J. Cronin

Michael lifted a menu from a stack on the counter and opened it. 'What's meatloaf?' I get the meat part, but a loaf of it? ~ Justin Cronin