Quotes from Justin Cronin

Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed.

Michael lifted a menu from a stack on the counter and opened it. 'What's meatloaf?' I get the meat part, but a loaf of it?

way clean over in Nebraska. He'd even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man

There is power in a name. It is through names that we bring all things into this world, and when they leave, it is names we carry with us, so they are never truly gone.

City of memories, city of mirrors.

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? I shall put the question another way: Who are we?

Lacey, you don't understand." He felt weightless, benumbed. He had nothing to fight with, not even a blade. "We're totally unarmed. I've seen what he can do." "There are weapons more powerful than guns and knives," the woman replied. Her face held no fear, only a sense of purpose. "It is time for you to see it." "See what?" "What you came to find," said Lacey. "The Passage.

Last night they came again. The soldiers had set up a defense perimeter, but there were simply too many—they must have come by the hundreds of thousands, a huge swarm that blotted out the stars. Three soldiers killed, as well as Cole. He was standing right in front of me; they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more instance in a chain of bad choices.

How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast.

It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage.

The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.

The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt—a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn't been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else's baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.

From small mistakes come great catastrophes;

Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand - once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over.

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there. —KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice

What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.

The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch.

She thought she should take a moment to pray. But, as she was holding a loaded rifle, conventional prayer did not seem entirely suitable. 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. She raised the gun to her clavicle and angled one eye down the length of the barrel.

Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.

To have a child was to receive the gift of true immortality—not time stopped, as it had stopped in Amy, but time continuing and everlasting.

For you, hunting the Twelve isn't an answer. It's a question. 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.

It wasn't a small thing, to love a person.