Top 180 Justin Cronin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “As long as we remember a person, they’re not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.”

— Justin Cronin

2. “Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it’s what you believe, and the heck with everybody.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

4. “My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.”

— Justin Cronin

5. “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?”

— Justin Cronin

6. “To know and be known: that was the final desire, the heart of love.”

— Justin Cronin

7. “I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.”

— Justin Cronin

8. “He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more – a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.”

— Justin Cronin

9. “The heart, once broken, stayed broken.”

— Justin Cronin

10. “For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.”

— Justin Cronin

11. “What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”

— Justin Cronin

12. “He had entered sleep’s antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories; yet part of him was still in the car, listening to the rain.”

— Justin Cronin

13. “You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.”

— Justin Cronin

Featured in: Reading Quotes

14. “Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.”

— Justin Cronin

15. “This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.”

— Justin Cronin

16. “And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

18. “Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step.”

— Justin Cronin

19. “One of the great themes in American literature is the individual’s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.”

— Justin Cronin

20. “But I did what I thought was right in the moment. In the end, that’s all a man has to measure his life, and it’s plenty.”

— Justin Cronin

21. “Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”

— Justin Cronin

22. “Nothing lasts forever.” “Some things do.” “What kind of things?” “The things we like to remember. The love we’ve felt for people.”

— Justin Cronin

23. “She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.”

— Justin Cronin

24. “If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what’s worth saving about it.”

— Justin Cronin

25. “I tend to start at 9 o’clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

27. “I’m still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They’ve been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on ‘The Passage’ and its sequels.”

— Justin Cronin

28. “God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back.”

— Justin Cronin

29. “If things had happened differently, they might have been just like any other brother and sister, their importance to one another fading over time as new connections took precedence. But not the two of them. New people would take the stage, but there would always be a room in their hearts in which only the two of them resided.”

— Justin Cronin

30. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

31. “So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.”

— Justin Cronin

32. “It’s different being afraid when there’s the hope it will amount to something.”

— Justin Cronin

33. “What was childhood if not a passage from light to dark, of the soul’s slow drowning in an ocean of ordinary matter? During.”

— Justin Cronin

34. “My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won’t necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.”

— Justin Cronin

35. “They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.”

— Justin Cronin

36. “And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.”

— Justin Cronin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

37. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

38. “It was funny, Grey thought. Not funny ha-ha but funny strange, the whole idea of time. He’d thought it was one thing but it was actually another.”

— Justin Cronin

39. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

40. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

41. “All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As.”

— Justin Cronin

42. “A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn’t care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.”

— Justin Cronin

43. “All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.”

— Justin Cronin

44. “I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.”

— Justin Cronin

45. “I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. “Kill” is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died.”

— Justin Cronin

46. “My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.”

— Justin Cronin

47. “The fact is, there’s a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.”

— Justin Cronin

48. “It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

50. “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.”

— Justin Cronin