Quotes from Justin Cronin

The doctor reached his gloved hands toward Grey's neck. As the tips of his fingers made contact, Grey darted his head forward.

I know it took a lot of courage, what you did. I wouldn't want you to think I didn't notice. But that's not what I'm talking about, not really. Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed. It's hope that's hard. You saw something out there that no one else could, and you followed it. That's something I could never do.

He felt not surprise or even regret but, rather, a deep and sudden gratitude and, with it, a force of clarity, filling him like a breath of winter air. He wondered what this feeling was and then he knew. He was giving her up.

Inside the walls

Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris: "It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.

The kiss. In the long hours on the catwalk, standing Mercy for Theo. Peter's mind had returned to it again and again, to the puzzle of its meaning, the kind of kiss it was. ....and it wasn't until he'd come into the Infirmary and seen her lying there that he understood what it was: a promise. A promise as clear as words from a girl who hadn't any. A kiss that said: I'll find you.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone.

It is the most beautiful star in the history of stars, which is the history of everything.

insomniac dread that send us prowling the halls to mull over every missed field goal, botched kiss, and embarrassing pratfall of our lives

The floor was slick with oil, the blood of the earth, time's distillate, compressed by a planet.

He has to come to it on his own.

She did not recall the words, only the idea: that loss was love's accounting, its unit of measure, as a foot was made of inches, a yard was made of feet.

Texas, state-sized porkchop of misery:

Is there no I but I?

Who would survive this day? And Vorhees knew, to his infinite sorrow, that once again he would be one of the lucky ones. They

Whoever thinks so doesn't understand the first thing about him. He went out there because he just couldn't stand not knowing, not for one more minute of his life.

We look no deeper into things because we do not desire this; neither are we meant to. That is the design of the world, to trick us into believing it is one thing, when it's entirely another.

The day-to-day. That was the term they used. Thinking neither of a past that was too much a story of loss and death, nor of a future that might never happen.

But you can only hate somebody for so long." She

What you thought was a maze of choices, all the possibilities of what your life might become, was, in fact, a series of steps you took along a road, and when you reached your destination and looked back, only one path—the one chosen for you—was visible.

He had entered sleep's antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories;

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, Maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything. -Mark Strand, "In the Afterlife

The world was not the world; it was an expression of a deeper reality, as the paint on the canvas was an expression of the artist's thoughts.

As the buck darted below the drop-off, she raised her blade and launched herself into the air.