Top 100 Justin Cronin Quotes
#1. 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.
Justin Cronin
#2. 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.
Justin Cronin
#3. 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
#4. What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.
Justin Cronin
#5. The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.
Justin Cronin
#6. All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.
Justin Cronin
#7. 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.
Justin Cronin
#8. One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
Justin Cronin
#9. 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
#10. Does anybody out there care? Are we worth saving? What would God want from me, if there is a God? The greatest faith is the willingness to ask in the first place, all evidence to the contrary. Faith not just in God, but in all of us.
Justin Cronin
#11. We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose.
Justin Cronin
#12. 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
#13. Don't be afraid to ask if you're on the right train.
Justin Cronin
#15. To know and be known: that was the final desire, the heart of love.
Justin Cronin
#16. If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.
Justin Cronin
#17. Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.
Justin Cronin
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.
Justin Cronin
#21. God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back.
Justin Cronin
#22. Nothing lasts forever." "Some things do." "What kind of things?" "The things we like to remember. The love we've felt for people.
Justin Cronin
#23. 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.
Justin Cronin
#24. 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
#25. Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.
Justin Cronin
#26. Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand - once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over.
Justin Cronin
#27. All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us.
Justin Cronin
#28. 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.
Justin Cronin
#29. I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
Justin Cronin
#30. 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
Justin Cronin
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.
Justin Cronin
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Justin Cronin
#36. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone.
Justin Cronin
#37. And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's?
Justin Cronin
#38. It was love, and only love, that opened your eyes.
Justin Cronin
#39. There were times when you couldn't fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.
Justin Cronin
#40. The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.
Justin Cronin
#41. 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
#43. For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.
Justin Cronin
#44. 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.
Justin Cronin
#45. It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage.
Justin Cronin
#46. I should think it a wonderful thing to be missed, the way that I miss him.
Justin Cronin
#47. 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.
Justin Cronin
#48. There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.
Justin Cronin
#49. 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
#50. That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that.
Justin Cronin
#51. I died and then was brought to life, the oldest tale there is. I
Justin Cronin
#52. He still had the young person's predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was.
Justin Cronin
#53. We made war on the planet, and the planet fought back.
Justin Cronin
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Mankind had built a world that would take hundred years to die. A century for the last lights to go out.
Justin Cronin
#57. If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.
Justin Cronin
#58. The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.
Justin Cronin
#59. What had happened, he said he wanted to go looking for him, make him live up to his responsibilities. But what Jeanette knew and didn't say was that Bill Reynolds was married, a married man;
Justin Cronin
#61. 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.
Justin Cronin
#62. 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?
Justin Cronin
#63. So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.
Justin Cronin
#64. Mary adored her mother with a hopeless affection, like an unrequited crush. She understood this feeling was common in middle children, as Mary was, but there was also a story.
Justin Cronin
#65. It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.
Justin Cronin
#66. You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
Justin Cronin
#68. When he decided they weren't police, he realized he'd been thinking maybe they were.
Justin Cronin
#69. 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.
Justin Cronin
#71. He had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He'd even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms,
Justin Cronin
#72. Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed.
Justin Cronin
#74. But as love turns to grief, and grief becomes anger, so must anger yield to thought, in order to know itself.
Justin Cronin
#75. Here she was, a women who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power.
Justin Cronin
#76. What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?
Justin Cronin
#77. I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.
Justin Cronin
#78. 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
#79. The man's name. And the truth was, she didn't mind any of it, not really: not the being pregnant, which was easy right until the end, nor the delivery itself, which was bad but fast, nor, especially,
Justin Cronin
#80. 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
#81. That was always the hardest part, missing you.
Justin Cronin
#82. I like cats as much as the next person, in the right quantity.
Justin Cronin
#83. Would somebody please tell him whose idea it had been to kill the entire state of Colorado?
Justin Cronin
#84. Events grabbed hold of you and in the blink of an eye there you were, with sore knees and a sour stomach and a face in the mirror your barely recognized, wondering how all of it had happened. If that was really your life. The
Justin Cronin
#85. All was a ruin, yet the world did not seem to know or care. In
Justin Cronin
#86. 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
#88. Since our first, furry ancestor scraped flint on stone and banished night with fire, we have climbed heavenward on a ladder made of our own arrogance.
Justin Cronin
#89. How strange it was ... , one minute you were all alone with your thoughts, the next somebody came along who seemed to know the deepest part of you, who could open you like a book.
Justin Cronin
#90. Everything got blended together. A sensation like pain
only worse, because it wasn't a pain in your body; the pain was in your mind and your mind was you. You were pain itself.
Justin Cronin
#91. What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
Justin Cronin
#92. The floor was slick with blood, so much blood that he felt his feet sliding on it, the grease of human remains.
Justin Cronin
#93. The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.
Justin Cronin
#94. Never a good sign, he thought, when the crows showed up.
Justin Cronin
#95. 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.
Justin Cronin
#96. 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
#97. This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.
Justin Cronin
#98. Events can seem random while you're living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more?
Justin Cronin
#99. Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step.
Justin Cronin
#100. This was their way; a lot was said by saying nothing. She
Justin Cronin
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