Quotes from Justin Cronin

Maybe just being alive, and having someone to love who loved you back, was enough.

Here she was, a women who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power.

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.

History is more than data, more than facts, more than science and scholarship. These things are merely the means to a greater end. History is a story—the story of ourselves. Where do we come from? How have we survived? How can we avoid the mistakes of the past? Do we matter, and if we do, what is our proper place upon the earth?

miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to...

Does anybody out there care? Are we worth saving? What would God want from me, if there is a God? The greatest faith is the willingness to ask in the first place, all evidence to the contrary. Faith not just in God, but in all of us.

Events can seem random while you're living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more?

He said books were more interesting than people.

Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'. "To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.

Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.

There was, Alicia realized, a single hour that all the days since your birth pointed you toward. 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.

That was the heart of the matter. A new world was coming; a new world was already here. Maybe that was what getting older taught you, when you looked in the mirror and saw the passage of time in your face, when you looked at your sleeping daughter and saw the girl you once were and would never be 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.

That's the worst part, really, when you think about it. 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.

He still had the young person's predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was.

I could have held his hand.

The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.

Who is the monster now?

All things passed away. Even the earth itself, the sky and the river and the stars he loved, would, one day, come to the end of their existence. But it was not a thing to be feared; such was the bittersweet beauty of life. He

He wonders if this is a lack within himself. Is there a part of the brain from which love comes that in his case has drastically malfunctioned? The world is awash in love—on the radio, in movies, in the pages of novels. Romantic love is the common cultural narrative, yet he seems immune to it. Thus, though he has yet to taste the pain that comes with love, he has experienced pain of a different, related sort: the fear of facing a life without it.

Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn't remember what you'd done to make it all happen.

Behind every great hatred is a love story. For I am a man who has known and tasted love. I say "a man" because that is how I know myself. Look at me, and what do you see? Do I not take the form of a man? Do I not feel as you do, suffer as you do, love as you do, mourn as you do? What is the essence of a man, if not these things?

There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present.

One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you've got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground.

There was something about him, a kind of warm light from inside that you wanted to be near. It reminded her of those little plastic sticks that you snapped so the liquid inside made them glow.