Quotes from Justin Cronin

The guy could sell sunlamps in a cancer ward.

The world was real and you were in it, a brief part but still a part, and if you were lucky, and maybe even if you weren't, the things you'd done for love would be remembered.

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.

Absolution is not the same as understanding.

We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose.

They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.

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.

Sometimes this place is like a big rudeness contest, but it's worth the hassle.

If things had happened differently, they might have been just like any other brother and sister, their importance to one another fading over time as new connections took precedence. But not the two of them. New people would take the stage, but there would always be a room in their hearts in which only the two of them resided.

No, there was no such thing as a good death.

But as with all such occurrences—those destined to be recounted not only in the immediate aftermath but for many years to come—time seemed compressed; it is a common error of memory to impose upon such events the coherence of a concentrated narrative, beginning with the assignment of a specific interval of time. That season. That year.

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

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate That Time will come and take my love away.

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

The sensation reminded him of a time many years ago when, just a boy, he'd been sick with a high fever, and after the fever had broken how just being up and about made even ordinary things seem charged with a fresh vitality.

His old man, who'd smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he'd done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.

Aqueles homens eram negros ou brancos, gordos ou magros, velhos ou novos, mas os olhos eram sempre os mesmos: vazios como ralos capazes de sugar o mundo inteiro.

Nevertheless, I stabbed him.

I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. "Kill" is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died.

suspending her body out over the ditch like a piano swinging from a crane.

Sister Claire often went to the 6:00 A.M. before her daily jog, which she referred to as a visit to "Our Lady of Endorphins.

The funny thing is, and speaking in hindsight, I had come to feel a certain fondness for the man. He was infuriating, yes, but his amiable manner made it impossible to dislike him. One rarely meets a person of such geniality, and I genuinely wished him no further ill. Nevertheless, I stabbed him.

It was true what Michael said about him: his blindness wasn't something missing; it was simply something different.

Why do certain arbitrary images stay with us, branded upon the walls of memory, while others sink forever into time's abyss?