Top 180 Justin Cronin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “This girl from nowhere. This Amy NLN. Who was alpha, who omega? Who the beginning and who the end?”

— Justin Cronin

52. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

53. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

54. “City of memories, city of mirrors.”

— Justin Cronin

55. “He felt not surprise or even regret but, rather, a deep and sudden gratitude and, with it, a force of clarity, filling him like a breath of winter air. He wondered what this feeling was and then he knew. He was giving her up.”

— Justin Cronin

56. “Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.”

— Justin Cronin

57. “All his life he had wanted to be known by just one person. That’s what love was, he decided. Love was being known.”

— Justin Cronin

58. “Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody’s business but yours.”

— Justin Cronin

59. “There was so much feeling in the world. So much sadness. So much longing. So much joy. Everything had a soul. The petals of flowers. The mice of the field. The clouds and rain and the bare limbs of trees. All.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

61. “Who is the monster now?”

— Justin Cronin

62. “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? I’ll tell you what I see, Peter. A clear path. More than that. A true path.”

— Justin Cronin

63. “I’m a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I’m at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.”

— Justin Cronin

64. “It’s love that enslaves us... It is the play within the play, the stage on which the tragic drama of our human lives unfold.”

— Justin Cronin

65. “The sadness you feel is not your own. It’s his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.”

— Justin Cronin

66. “A good death, everyone agreed, to die at home in bed as Prudence Jaxon had. But Peter had been at her side through the final hours and knew how terrible it had been for her, how much she’d suffered. No, there was no such thing as a good death.”

— Justin Cronin

67. “SIXTY-NINE She was Amy, and she was forever. She was one of Twelve and also the other, the one above and behind, the Zero. She was the Girl from Nowhere, the One Who Walked In, who lived a thousand years; Amy of Multitudes, the Girl with the Souls Inside Her. She was Amy. She was Amy. She was Amy. She.”

— Justin Cronin

68. “Sunset was an hour off but the clouds were hanging low, sponging up the last of the light.”

— Justin Cronin

69. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

70. “One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy – or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use – is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.”

— Justin Cronin

71. “I died and then was brought to life, the oldest tale there is. I.”

— Justin Cronin

72. “The guy could sell sunlamps in a cancer ward.”

— Justin Cronin

73. “Sometimes this place is like a big rudeness contest, but it’s worth the hassle.”

— Justin Cronin

74. “I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others.”

— Justin Cronin

75. “We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose.”

— Justin Cronin

76. “It was true what Michael said about him: his blindness wasn’t something missing; it was simply something different.”

— Justin Cronin

77. “Behind every great hatred is a love story.”

— Justin Cronin

78. “A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a 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 it’s body keeping always longing to be known.”

— Justin Cronin

79. “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. Holding.”

— Justin Cronin

80. “There’s an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I’m not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.”

— Justin Cronin

81. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

82. “I should think it a wonderful thing to be missed, the way that I miss him.”

— Justin Cronin

83. “A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.”

— Justin Cronin

84. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

85. “I was very much a child of the Cold War.”

— Justin Cronin

86. “Absolution is not the same as understanding.”

— Justin Cronin

87. “It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained – they all swirled together in the mind like a soup.”

— Justin Cronin

88. “If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn’t have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.”

— Justin Cronin

89. “That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that.”

— Justin Cronin

90. “She took the disc in her hand, holding it by the edges. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting. ‘I just thought you should hear what you look like,’ said Elton.”

— Justin Cronin

91. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

92. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

93. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

94. “Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.”

— Justin Cronin

95. “And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.”

— Justin Cronin

96. “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. But.”

— Justin Cronin

97. “Weren’t the question the man had wrong, it was his way of asking it.”

— Justin Cronin

98. “I like creating villains.”

— Justin Cronin

99. “It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.”

— Justin Cronin

100. “That’s what love was, he decided. Love was being known.”

— Justin Cronin