Top 100 Justin Cronin Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Yet, to yield, to accept death: the mind forbade it. The mind demanded, against all sense, to go on. Fanning
Justin Cronin
#3. 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.
Justin Cronin
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Weren't the question the man had wrong, it was his way of asking it.
Justin Cronin
#7. Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.
Justin Cronin
#8. 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
#9. I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.
Justin Cronin
#10. Way clean over in Nebraska. He'd even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man
Justin Cronin
#11. It was true, what they said about the stars. The more you looked, the more you saw.
Justin Cronin
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.
Justin Cronin
#15. 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
#16. All of his life he had feared the darkness and what it could bring; no one, not even his father, had told him how beautiful the night sky was, how it made you feel both small and large at the same time, while also a part of something vast and eternal.
Justin Cronin
#17. 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
#18. All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us.
Justin Cronin
#19. You are Entering the Red Zone.
Proceed at Own Risk.
When in Doubt Run.
Justin Cronin
#20. 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.
Justin Cronin
#21. We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most
Justin Cronin
#22. 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
#23. Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand - once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over.
Justin Cronin
#24. 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
#25. Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.
Justin Cronin
#26. 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
#27. I should think it a wonderful thing to be missed, the way that I miss him.
Justin Cronin
#28. It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage.
Justin Cronin
#29. 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
#30. For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.
Justin Cronin
#32. If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
Justin Cronin
#33. He knew what he'd see; one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long.
Justin Cronin
#34. 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
#35. The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.
Justin Cronin
#36. This is a writ of commutation, Anthony, signed by Governor Jenna Bush.
Justin Cronin
#37. There were times when you couldn't fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.
Justin Cronin
#38. It was love, and only love, that opened your eyes.
Justin Cronin
#39. 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
#40. And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's?
Justin Cronin
#43. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone.
Justin Cronin
#44. Maybe just being alive, and having someone to love who loved you back, was enough.
Justin Cronin
#45. What was childhood if not a passage from light to dark, of the soul's slow drowning in an ocean of ordinary matter? During
Justin Cronin
#46. 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
#48. 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.
Justin Cronin
#49. 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
#51. 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
#52. Don't be afraid to ask if you're on the right train.
Justin Cronin
#53. 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
#54. 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
Justin Cronin
#55. 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
#56. One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.
Justin Cronin
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. By the time they were done Peter realized that something significant had occurred, an acknowledgment that once made, could not be unmade. The body they had buried might have been a viral, but the person they had buried was a man.
Justin Cronin
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.
Justin Cronin
#63. What is home but a place where you are truly known?
Justin Cronin
#64. 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
#65. All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.
Justin Cronin
#66. They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I'm here to say that it's not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be.
Justin Cronin
#67. The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.
Justin Cronin
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.
Justin Cronin
#71. What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.
Justin Cronin
#72. She would be a girl; Lila had seen her on the ultrasound. A baby girl. Tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny heart and lungs, floating in the warm broth of her body.
Justin Cronin
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back.
Justin Cronin
#81. My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.
Justin Cronin
#82. There was so much feeling in the world. So much sadness. So much longing. So much joy. Everything had a soul. The petals of flowers. The mice of the field. The clouds and rain and the bare limbs of trees. All
Justin Cronin
#83. 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
#84. It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.
Justin Cronin
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you've got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground.
Justin Cronin
#91. Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.
Justin Cronin
#92. There was something about him, a kind of warm light from inside that you wanted to be near. It reminded her of those little plastic sticks that you snapped so the liquid inside made them glow.
Justin Cronin
#93. 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
#94. To know and be known: that was the final desire, the heart of love.
Justin Cronin
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. This here is Juan Sweeting, my second," Michael said. "Goes by Ceps." They shook, the man greeting him with a grunt. "How'd you get the name Ceps?" Peter asked. "I haven't heard that before." The man curled his arms, popping a pair of biceps like two large grapefruits.
Justin Cronin
#99. 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
#100. We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.
Justin Cronin
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