Top 180 Justin Cronin Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words.”

— Justin Cronin

153. “It was love, and only love, that opened your eyes.”

— Justin Cronin

154. “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

155. “What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?”

— Justin Cronin

156. “So, at the last, a story.”

— Justin Cronin

157. “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

158. “There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another – a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams.”

— Justin Cronin

159. “Results for “It’s funny. You can live your whole life and then suddenly know that you didn’t do it right at all.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

161. “It’s love that enslaves us.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

163. “Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand – once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over.”

— Justin Cronin

164. “Writers who pretend that everything they’re doing is completely new are full of it.”

— Justin Cronin

165. “Auntie had nothing to say to that. Whatever was on this man’s mind, it had nothing to do with her. There were times when you couldn’t fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.”

— Justin Cronin

166. “Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can’t figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

168. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

169. “The day-to-day. That was the term they used. Thinking neither of a past that was too much a story of loss and death, nor of a future that might never happen.”

— Justin Cronin

170. “An unanticipated longing washed over him; how he wished his father were here. For weeks he had kept this feeling at bay. Holding his son in his arms, he could no longer. Tears poured from his eyes.”

— Justin Cronin

171. “She did not recall the words, only the idea: that loss was love’s accounting, its unit of measure, as a foot was made of inches, a yard was made of feet.”

— Justin Cronin

172. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

173. “In 1945, scientific knowledge leaped way ahead of our maturity as a species. We are still lagging way behind.”

— Justin Cronin

174. “This is a writ of commutation, Anthony, signed by Governor Jenna Bush.”

— Justin Cronin

175. “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.”

— Justin Cronin

176. “His old man, who’d smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he’d done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.”

— Justin Cronin

177. “A hundred and twelve miles to the north, traveling east on Interstate 76, Kittridge had also begun to worry about fuel.”

— Justin Cronin

178. “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

179. “I will give you childhood, so that you might know innocence. Age, so you will know the prize of youth. Children, so that you will care for the future. Toil, so that you will know the value of a day. The body’s failings, so that you will know its worth. Death, so that you will cherish the bittersweet beauty of life.”

— Justin Cronin

180. “War, pestilence, famine, environmental collapse; vast migrations and fanaticism of every stripe; a world de-civilized as the earth’s peoples, sworn to competing gods, turned upon one another:.”

— Justin Cronin

181. “And how am I to face the odds Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?”

— Justin Cronin

182. “It is the most beautiful star in the history of stars, which is the history of everything.”

— Justin Cronin

183. “Yet something nagged at me. It is impossible, of course, to completely know another person; we are, in the end, prisoners of our own minds.”

— Justin Cronin

184. “But he’d done far braver things in his life – all his life – not the least of which was warming another man’s child against his skin while outside the snow poured down, and loving that child so fiercely she became his own. Your daddy.”

— Justin Cronin

185. “The mind works wondrously; it is capable of astonishing feats. It is the only machine in nature capable of thinking one thing while knowing its opposite.”

— Justin Cronin

186. “It is within this space that revelations come, and mine is this: there’s only one thing I can do to help my father now, something I have never done before. I kiss him on the forehead. “I love you,” I tell him.”

— Justin Cronin

187. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

189. “Nevertheless, I stabbed him.”

— Justin Cronin

190. “We look no deeper into things because we do not desire this; neither are we meant to. That is the design of the world, to trick us into believing it is one thing, when it’s entirely another.”

— Justin Cronin

191. “Why do certain arbitrary images stay with us, branded upon the walls of memory, while others sink forever into time’s abyss?”

— Justin Cronin