Top 180 Justin Cronin Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you’re already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They’re rhetorical, not visual, but it’s the same move.”

— Justin Cronin

102. “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

103. “It was as if I’d lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be dine about it.”

— Justin Cronin

104. “I like creating villains.”

— Justin Cronin

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

108. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

109. “Writing is a job: you must show up.”

— Justin Cronin

110. “He said books were more interesting than people.”

— Justin Cronin

111. “I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.”

— Justin Cronin

112. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

113. “I like to break left when people think I’m going to go right.”

— Justin Cronin

114. “The end of the world, he’d thought. That’s where he was. The end of the world was Houston, Texas.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

116. “He knew what he’d see; one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long.”

— Justin Cronin

117. “It wasn’t a small thing, to love a person.”

— Justin Cronin

118. “Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.”

— Justin Cronin

119. “What is home but a place where you are truly known?”

— Justin Cronin

120. “Would somebody please tell him whose idea it had been to kill the entire state of Colorado?”

— Justin Cronin

121. “His son’s transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.”

— Justin Cronin

122. “Everything got blended together. A sensation like pain – only worse, because it wasn’t a pain in your body; the pain was in your mind and your mind was you. You were pain itself.”

— Justin Cronin

123. “From small mistakes come great catastrophes;.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

127. “Events grabbed hold of you and in the blink of an eye there you were, with sore knees and a sour stomach and a face in the mirror your barely recognized, wondering how all of it had happened. If that was really your life. The.”

— Justin Cronin

128. “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?”

— Justin Cronin

129. “One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.”

— Justin Cronin

130. “By the time they were done Peter realized that something significant had occurred, an acknowledgment that once made, could not be unmade. The body they had buried might have been a viral, but the person they had buried was a man.”

— Justin Cronin

131. “There’s a power at work here, something beyond our understanding. You can call it what you like. It doesn’t need a name, because it knows yours, my friend.”

— Justin Cronin

132. “The sky above was a vault of blackness-and everywhere, the stars!”

— Justin Cronin

133. “We made war on the planet, and the planet fought back.”

— Justin Cronin

134. “He was Babcock and he was forever. He was one of Twelve and also the Other, the one above and behind, the Zero. He was the night of nights and he had been Babcock before he became what he was. Before the great hunger that was like time itself inside him, a current in the blood, endless and needful, infinite and without border, a dark wing spreading over the world.”

— Justin Cronin

135. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

136. “Because the world was not the world, that was the thing, that was the terrible truth he had discovered. It was a dream world, a veil of light and sound and matter that the real world hid behind. Walkers in a dream of death, that’s what they were, and the dreamer was the girl, this Girl from Nowhere. The world was a dream and she was dreaming them!”

— Justin Cronin

137. “Eustace remembered a day like this one: spring on the cusp of summer, the earth unclenching its fist, thick green leaves, rich with fragrance, fattening the trees. A.”

— Justin Cronin

138. “I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.”

— Justin Cronin

139. “Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone.”

— Justin Cronin

140. “I like cats as much as the next person, in the right quantity.”

— Justin Cronin

141. “Too many what-ifs are just a way to keep yourself up at night, and there’s not enough decent sleep to go around.”

— Justin Cronin

142. “The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant.”

— Justin Cronin

143. “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 multitude. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.”

— Justin Cronin

144. “When they come, they come from above.”

— Justin Cronin

145. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

146. “When he decided they weren’t police, he realized he’d been thinking maybe they were.”

— Justin Cronin

147. “In the past, when she’d looked at her reflection, she had still seen the little girl she’d once been; the woman in the mirror had still been an extension of her girlhood self. Now it was the future she saw. The wrinkles would deepen; her skin would sag; the lights of her eyes would dim. Her youth was fading, easing into the past.”

— Justin Cronin

148. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

149. “So, whenever I’m writing, I’m writing in the presence of all the other books I’ve read and I think we all are.”

— Justin Cronin

150. “All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us.”

— Justin Cronin