Quotes from Justin Cronin

All was a ruin, yet the world did not seem to know or care. In

She thought she'd hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her.

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.

It is an interesting truth that the human body, liberated from its head, is in essence a bag of blood with a built-in straw.

Wolgast leaned back in his chair and realized how exhausted he was. It always came upon him like this, like the sudden unclenching of a fist.

The grass was tall and parched, the limbs of the trees barren or else dotted with a few remaining leaves, the stragglers, bleached to the color of bone. They lifted in the breeze like waving hands, rustling like old paper.

The floor was slick with blood, so much blood that he felt his feet sliding on it, the grease of human remains.

It's not that I don't believe you," Peter managed. "I'm sorry. It's just that...it's only a story." "Perhaps." She shrugged. "And perheps someday someone will say those very words about you, Peter. What do you say to that?

So, at the last, a story.

She would be a girl; Lila had seen her on the ultrasound. A baby girl. Tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny heart and lungs, floating in the warm broth of her body.

He carried her through the smoking ruins, and she saw that he was weeping. Those are God's own tears, Lacey thought, yearning to reach out and touch them. It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.

I was in a room of the bluest light—pure blue, cerulean blue, the blue the sky would be if it were married to the sea.

There were times when you couldn't fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.

The law does not require that to be proved which is apparent to the court.'

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Sua vida lhe era tão estranha que não parecia mais ser sua, se é que algum dia tinha sido.

You are Entering the Red Zone. Proceed at Own Risk. When in Doubt Run.

I felt, driving home, that for the first time in many years, maybe ever, I was coming truly alive, and here's the thing: the problem of being alive is that it makes you frightened.

The memory was unpleasant; he'd taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.

The world had a way of speaking to you if you let it; the trick was learning to hear.

her words, rather than functioning as a mere decoration of the experience, actually deepened its reality. It was the first time that I felt the power of language to intensify life. The

But I suppose it's part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one's left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it's like I've got so many people inside of me I'm never alone at all. And when I go, I'll be taking them with me.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand thousand stories—of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in its body's keeping always longing to be known. She

Hope was a thing that gave you pain, and that's what this girl was. A painful sort of hope.