Top 180 Justin Cronin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “In her mind’s eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death’s great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.”

— Justin Cronin

152. “Because the game was the world’s natural state. Because the game was war, it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ?”

— Justin Cronin

153. “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

154. “There was, Alicia realized, a single hour that all the days since your birth pointed you toward. What you thought was a maze of choices, all the possibilities of what your life might become, was, in fact, a series of steps you took along a road, and when you reached your destination and looked back, only one path – the one chosen for you – was visible.”

— Justin Cronin

155. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

159. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

161. “So, at the last, a story.”

— Justin Cronin

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

165. “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

166. “It’s love that enslaves us.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

177. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

186. “Nevertheless, I stabbed him.”

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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