Quotes from Justin Cronin

It has been said that in ancient times there was only one gender; in that blissful state, humankind existed until, as punishment, the gods divided each of us in two, a cruel mitosis that sent each half forever spinning across the earth in search of its mate, so that it could be whole again.

the passage of time itself a kind of marvel

First one and then another and then more and more, their frozen figures resolving out of the gloom. Most were seated around a series of tall tables, their postures grimly comical, as if they'd been overcome in the midst of some desperate, private act.

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.

that it was and always would be impossible to know what was dream and what was not; that all creation was boxes within boxes within boxes, each the dream of a different god.

For me, science wasn't about the big picture but the small one—the

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.

and the thought came to me then that who we are to one another isn't so easy to categorize after all: that fathers can be sons, and lovers friends, and daughters mothers, and that such words as these tell only half the story, maybe not even half.

Before she'd left Iowa, Jeanette had never seen but one or two black people in her life, except on television and in the movies. But Memphis was crawling with them.

He was facing an open door. He took a deep breath and stepped forward. He stepped into the stars. It hit him in the lungs first, shoving the breath from his chest. A feeling of pure physical panic, as if he'd stepped onto nothing, onto the night sky itself.

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.

Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitudes. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. We may have loved, but never well enough. We never truly knew ourselves. We forgot the world; now it has forgotten us. How

It was as if he had lived all of his twenty-six years within an artificially narrow bandwidth of his potential personhood, only to have the scales fall abruptly from his eyes.

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

There was a term he knew and thought of now; he had heard it used only in the context of aviation, to explain how, on an otherwise clear day, a plane could fall so quickly from the sky. OBE. Overcome by events. That was what was happening now. The world—the human race—had been overcome by events.

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.

little-known fact, though not unacknowledged by my scientist's eye, is that the ceiling of Grand Central is actually backward. It is a mirror image of the night sky; lore holds that the artist was working from a medieval manuscript that showed the heavens not from within but from without—not mankind's view but God's. I

In their disfigured semibaldness, something private had been stolen, melding them into a indistinguishable collection, like animals in a herd.

Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.

The world is not my home, (she sang in her silky voice) for I'm just passing through. The treasures are laid up somewhere, high beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven's open door, and I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

A baby wasn't an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

The restraints were nothing, like paper. The rivets popped from the table and shot across the room. First his arms and then his legs. The room was dark but hid nothing from his eyes, because the darkness was part of him now. And inside him, far down, a great devouring hunger uncoiled itself. To eat the very world. To take it all inside him and be filled by it, made whole. To make the world eternal, as he was.

Sister Peg hoped that God would help her, but it was her belief that He much preferred for people to attend to themselves. Life was a test; it was up to you to pass it or not.

Loving their boy was just another way of loving each other.