Justin Cronin > Quotes

“We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“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, The Summer Guest

“What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“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 Passage

“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, The Twelve

“Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“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, The Passage

“Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“All his life he had wanted to be known by just one person. That’s what love was, he decided. Love was being known.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“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, The Passage

“For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth.

Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Sorry, we made vampires; it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“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.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“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.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“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, The Passage

“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.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“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, The Passage

“That was always the hardest part, missing you.”
― Justin Cronin, The Twelve

“A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.' That's T.S. Eliot, in case you were wondering. An oldie but a goodie. When it came to existential exhaustion, the man was one smart cookie.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors