Quotes from Justin Cronin

It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust. A

God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back. She wondered what she would do.

It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust.

But Peter knew that over time, even just a few months' worth, this memory would fade, like all the others—like the colors of Auntie's photograph. First the sound of Theo's voice would be lost, and then the picture itself, the details dissolving into visual static until all that remained was an empty space where his brother had been.

Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are.

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 many years will pass before jealous nature reclaims this place? Before it is as if we never existed at all?

Why did some images stay with us that way, he wondered, arbitrary flashes of life seared into memory, while others vanished without a trace?

Sorry, we made vampires, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

But probably they were all sleeping, too. It was only she, Arnette, who was sentenced to a night of pacing the halls of her mind. Because

How wonderful, to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, borne away on words. And

There was a deep heartache inside its phrases, but the feeling was expressed with such tenderness that it did not seem sad. It made him think of the way time felt, always falling into the past, becoming memory.

El mundo es real y tú formas parte de él, una parte fugaz, pero una parte al fin y al cabo, y si tienes suerte, y tal vez incluso si no la tienes, los actos que realizas por amor serán recordados.

But as love turns to grief, and grief becomes anger, so must anger yield to thought, in order to know itself. My symbolic properties were inarguable. Made by science, I was a perfect industrial product, the very embodiment of mankind's indefatigable faith in itself. 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.

The sight of a rich man dying is one to shake all your assumptions about a free market economy; here

Yet something nagged at me. It is impossible, of course, to completely know another person; we are, in the end, prisoners of our own minds.

he had imparted to her the greatest gift, which was the courage to go on. That's what love is, she told the boy, what love does. I hope someday you love somebody the way that I loved him.

as the years had passed

O sleep! O gentle sleep! Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down And steep my senses in forgetfulness? —SHAKESPEARE, Henry IV, Part II

Maybe. Maybe I'm just talking out of my exhaust pipe, and it wouldn't be the first time.

just longitude and latitude. Thirty-seven degrees, fifty-six minutes north by one hundred seven degrees, forty-nine minutes west.

Something irrevocable had happened, beyond knowing. He looked down at the body. He had felt her soul leaving her. It had brushed him like a breeze, only a breeze that was inside him, made of words. Thank you, thank you. I am free.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I ey'd, Such seems your beauty still. —SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 104

Life wrests that feeling from us. Day by day, the sublime glimpses of childhood pass away. It is love, of course, and only love, that restores us to ourselves, or so we hope, but that is taken away. What is left when there is no love?

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.