Quotes from 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?

exaggerated boogeymen in scary stories told by their elders, who, in the fashion of all old people since the dawn of time, believed theirs had been the vastly harder and more consequential life.

How surprising death was, how irrevocable and complete, how much itself.

Give people hope, and you could make them do just about anything. And not just your average, everyday kind of hope—for food or clothes or the absence of pain or good suburban schools or low down payments with easy financing. What people needed was a hope beyond the visible world, the world of the body and its trials, of life's endless dull parade of things.

but his mind, free to go wherever it wished, chose to move over the past, hovering atop it like a bird over some immense body of water, no shoreline in sight, only the distant reflection of himself in its shining surface for company.

We're just people. I don't know what's up that mountain, but I do know that much. We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

The horse was called Diamond because of the marking on her brow, an orphaned splash of white beneath the swishing mask of her long forelock;

Demorou uma eternidade e acabou num instante.

It's funny. You can live your whole life and then suddenly know that you didn't do it right at all

She took off her glasses and put them in my hand. 'You know, without these, I can't see anything. What's funny is that it's like no one else can see me either. Isn't it strange? I kind of feel invisible.

and stepped into the hall, sealing the door and the voices of the children behind her. A blast of quiet that felt like noise;

Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on.

He felt not so much awake as ejected bodily from sleep; his mind felt beaten clean.

man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove;

Sometimes, Carter told her, you got to let a garden tend itself.

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.

He felt a great love for everything; he would have wrapped the world with his heart if he could.

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

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.

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.

So: the end of the line. How slow its approach, how sudden its arrival. We never truly believe it's coming, he thought, and then before we know it, it's here. All the things we've done in our lives, and the undone things as well, extinguished in an instant.

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

In the Macomb household, cocktail hour was religion.

History isn't what you had for breakfast. That's meaningless data, gone with the wind. History is that scar on your hand. It's the stories that leave a mark, the past that refuses to stay past.