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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 -- 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

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

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

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

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

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

What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it. -- Justin Cronin

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 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

There were times when you couldn't fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times. -- 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

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

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

The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you. -- 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

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was always the hardest part, missing you. -- Justin Cronin

So, at the last, a story. -- Justin Cronin

When they come, they come from above. -- Justin Cronin

What is home but a place where you are truly known? -- Justin Cronin

Yet, to yield, to accept death: the mind forbade it. The mind demanded, against all sense, to go on. Fanning -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

It was true, what they said about the stars. The more you looked, the more you saw. -- Justin Cronin

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

We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

It was love, and only love, that opened your eyes. -- Justin Cronin

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

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? -- Justin Cronin

The guy could sell sunlamps in a cancer ward. -- Justin Cronin

They always come home. -- Justin Cronin

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

Maybe just being alive, and having someone to love who loved you back, was enough. -- Justin Cronin

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

I could have held his hand. -- Justin Cronin

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

All things found their ends. -- Justin Cronin

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

Don't be afraid to ask if you're on the right train. -- 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways. -- 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 world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die. -- 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

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right. -- Justin Cronin

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

God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back. -- Justin Cronin

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

City of memories, city of mirrors. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load. -- Justin Cronin

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? -- Justin Cronin

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

It's love that enslaves us. -- Justin Cronin

Eustace remembered a day like this one: spring on the cusp of summer, the earth unclenching its fist, thick green leaves, rich with fragrance, fattening the trees. A -- 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

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

We made war on the planet, and the planet fought back. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

Never a good sign, he thought, when the crows showed up. -- Justin Cronin

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

Absolution is not the same as understanding. -- Justin Cronin

This girl from nowhere. This Amy NLN. Who was alpha, who omega? Who the beginning and who the end? -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

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

I like creating villains. -- Justin Cronin

He had entered sleep's antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories; yet part of him was still in the car, listening to the rain. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

The world had a way of speaking to you if you let it; the trick was learning to hear. -- Justin Cronin

This was their way; a lot was said by saying nothing. She -- Justin Cronin

Writing is a job: you must show up. -- 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

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world. -- Justin Cronin

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

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

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

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. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

The heart, once broken, stayed broken. -- Justin Cronin

Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step. -- Justin Cronin

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

I died and then was brought to life, the oldest tale there is. I -- Justin Cronin

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

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. -- 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

From small mistakes come great catastrophes; -- Justin Cronin

The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant -- 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

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

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

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

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

I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood. -- 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

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

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. -- Justin Cronin

Mankind had built a world that would take hundred years to die. A century for the last lights to go out. -- Justin Cronin

Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

Who is the monster now? -- 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

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

A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren't fixable. -- Justin Cronin

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings. -- Justin Cronin

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

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

How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words. -- Justin Cronin

The floor was slick with blood, so much blood that he felt his feet sliding on it, the grease of human remains. -- Justin Cronin

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