Quotes from Justin Cronin

In a hundred years, you get around to thinking about pretty much everything. All the things you did, the people you knew, the mistakes you made. The books you read, the music you listened to, how the sun felt, the rain. It's all still there inside you. But it's not enough, is it? That's the thing. The past is never enough.

An unanticipated longing washed over him; how he wished his father were here. For weeks he had kept this feeling at bay. Holding his son in his arms, he could no longer. Tears poured from his eyes.

All his many nights at sea, the stars had been his most loyal companions. He preferred them to the moon, which seemed to him too frank, always begging to be noticed; the stars maintained a certain cagey distance, permitting the mystery of their hidden selves to breathe.

again. 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.

The sky above was a vault of blackness-and everywhere, the stars!

War, pestilence, famine, environmental collapse; vast migrations and fanaticism of every stripe; a world de-civilized as the earth's peoples, sworn to competing gods, turned upon one another:

You didn't talk about yourself, because you weren't really anybody, or your hopes, since you had none.

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

In 1945, scientific knowledge leaped way ahead of our maturity as a species. We are still lagging way behind.

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

When evening fell he dragged a chair out to the porch, where he sat through the night, a shotgun on his lap, staring into the dark.

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

Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born

Said books were more interesting than people.

Now it is dark. Stars soar above the vacant city, heaven's diadem. A century since the last person walked here, and still one cannot travel its streets, as I do, without seeing one's face reflected a thousand-fold.

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.

They always come home.

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

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.

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 instance 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.

soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.

It is within this space that revelations come, and mine is this: there's only one thing I can do to help my father now, something I have never done before. I kiss him on the forehead. "I love you," I tell him.

Though there were those in the Colony who still spoke of heaven – a place, beyond physical existence, where the soul went after death – the idea had never made sense to him. The world was the world, a realm of the senses that could be touched and tasted and felt, and it seemed to Peter that the dead, if they went anywhere at all, would pass into the living.

If being a parent taught you one thing, it was that you could worry all you wanted, but it wouldn't change a thing.