Top 60 Marianne Cronin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The doors that don’t make a show of themselves usually have the best stuff behind them.”

— Marianne Cronin

2. “This I thought must be how parents who send their children to boarding school feel when they visit. Guilty and sad. And like each time you see your child, they become someone else and the next time you visit, they’ll be another someone else entirely.”

— Marianne Cronin

3. “The cruelty of strangers never usually upsets me, but the kindness of strangers is oddly devastating.”

— Marianne Cronin

4. “The thing about whiteboards is that they’re so easily wiped clean. They’re designed to be used again and again and again for the names of the unlucky few who find themselves in the May Ward. One day, in just the briefest stroke of a dry whiteboard eraser, I’ll be gone. A.”

— Marianne Cronin

5. “I didn’t say anything. Sometimes it’s better not to. Silence can be more powerful than speech when trying to convey abject treachery and disappointment. Anything I said would only make her feel better.”

— Marianne Cronin

6. “And I will be forever changed by the people I have met and their bravery, their courage and their light.”

— Marianne Cronin

7. “I get asked why more often than I get asked anything else. Why is always the hard one. I can do the how and the what and the who, but the why, that’s the one I can’t even pretend to know.”

— Marianne Cronin

8. “Do you know,’ she said slowly, ‘that the stars that we see the clearest are already dead?’ ‘Well, that’s depressing.’ I took my hand from hers. ‘No,’ she said gently, linking her arm through mine, ‘it’s not depressing, it’s beautiful. They’ve been gone for who knows how long, but we can still see them. They live on.’ They live on.”

— Marianne Cronin

9. “Chaos and commotion, her two closest companions in life, deserted her in her final hours.”

— Marianne Cronin

10. “He offered his love like a cough drop. As though it were nothing at all.”

— Marianne Cronin

11. “How many lives had I lived since I last saw him? How many moments? How many days?”

— Marianne Cronin

12. “If the mind is so powerful that it can kill a man with no illness and save a man who’s dying, I would never want to give my brain the opportunity to kill me by not believing that I might get better.”

— Marianne Cronin

13. “We have practiced for death every night. Lying down in the dark and slipping into that place of nothingness between rest and dreams where we have no consciousness, no self, and anything could befall our vulnerable bodies. We have died each night. Or at least, we have laid down to die, and let go of everything in this world, hoping for dreams and morning.”

— Marianne Cronin

14. “If you go to the places we have been, you might meet someone who passed us once in a corridor but forgot us before we were even gone. We are in the back of hundreds of people’s photographs – moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living-room mantelpiece. And in that way, we will live on, too.”

— Marianne Cronin

15. “Hostility is fine, it’s the sympathy that kills you.”

— Marianne Cronin

16. “The answer I have, the only one I have,” he said, “is that you are dying because you are dying. Not because of God’s deciding to punish you and not because He is neglecting you, but simply because you are. It is a part of your story as much as you are.”

— Marianne Cronin

17. “I turned the page to Ecclesiastes 9:9 Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life.”

— Marianne Cronin

18. “Well, this is my final truth: if I had a granddaughter, I would want her to be exactly like you.”

— Marianne Cronin

19. “We want for people to know us, to know our story, to know who we are and who we will be. And after we’ve gone, to know who we were.”

— Marianne Cronin

20. “I think the same is true of dying. We can’t know why you are dying in the same way that we can’t know why you are living. Living and dying are both complete mysteries, and you can’t know either until you have done both.”

— Marianne Cronin

21. “What I mean is, you’re not dying right now. In fact, right now you’re living.’ Margot and I both watched her try to explain. ‘Your heart is beating and your eyes are seeing and your ears are hearing. You’re sitting in this room completely alive. And so you’re not dying. You’re living.”

— Marianne Cronin

22. “It’s horrible, you know,’ he continued, ‘to have to tell people I don’t have the answer they want. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a place of answers – it’s just that they might not be the answers you expect.”

— Marianne Cronin

23. “People say that when you die, it’s because God is calling you back to him, so I thought I’d get the introduction over and done with ahead of time.”

— Marianne Cronin

24. “It isn’t enough to have been a particle in the great extant of existence. I want, we want, more. We want for people to know us, to know our story, to know who we are and who we will be. And after we’ve gone, to know who we were.”

— Marianne Cronin

25. “And he led me up the stairs to the attic, where his homemade observatory let us mere mortals glimpse at the heavens.”

— Marianne Cronin

26. “Somewhere, out in the world, are the people who touched us, or loved us, or ran from us. In that way we will live on.”

— Marianne Cronin

27. “When he died, I got seasick. It was as though the world had tilted at a strange angle and nothing felt right. What should have been flat was actually an incline, and I found myself holding on to handrails and faltering on steps as I’d never done before. The pain of losing him hadn’t subsided like people said it would.”

— Marianne Cronin

28. “Lastly, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose by Mick Short, which is not designed to teach creative writing, but is one of the most useful books I’ve ever read. It picks apart literature to show how language is used in fiction to create certain effects.”

— Marianne Cronin

29. “I thought she would wait. I thought there was no way she would leave without saying goodbye. And so it came as a surprise when I peeped out of the window to see if she was crying yet, and found that the taxi had gone and my father had gone with it.”

— Marianne Cronin

30. “Im trying to imply that putting a church inside a hospital is like looking at an oil painting to see what the weather will be like.”

— Marianne Cronin

31. “I took it and opened it up into a perfect square, and then I buried my face in it. It was absorbent and smelled of church. It was like crying onto the hem of the pope’s best dress.”

— Marianne Cronin

32. “Dying isn’t brave,’ I said, ’it’s accidental. I’m not brave, I’m just not dead yet.”

— Marianne Cronin

33. “Trust yourself that you will know. In the same way you know when you have hunger and thirst, you will know when it is time. I hope for you, sweet nose, that it isn’t for a long time yet.”

— Marianne Cronin

34. “Of course, I don’t blame them – they are the wardens and we are the prisoners, and if they get too close, the lines might become blurred as to who is captive and who is free.”

— Marianne Cronin

35. “Can you tell me one truth. One cruel, refreshing truth. No church thing, no fancy wording, just something you know to your core to be true, even if it hurts you. Even if you would be fired if your bosses heard you say it to me.” “My bosses as you put it are Jesus and the Lord.” “Well, they certainly won’t fire you. They love truth.”

— Marianne Cronin

36. “Lenni, wherever you are. Whatever wonderful world you find yourself in now. Wherever that fiery heart is, that quick wit, that disabling charm. Know that I love you. For the brief lifetime that we knew each other, I loved you like you were my very own daughter. You found an old woman worthy of your immense friendship and for that I am forever in your debt. So I have to say thank you.”

— Marianne Cronin

37. “We are in the back of hundreds of people’s photographs – moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living-room mantelpiece.”

— Marianne Cronin

38. “IT’S SO UNFAIR, Lenni. That I got to get old and you didn’t. That I continue to be old and getting older when you aren’t even here at all. If I could take my years and give them to you, I would.”

— Marianne Cronin

39. “I see.” Father Arthur folded his arms across his round tummy. I wonder if God deliberately has all of his priests slowly start to resemble Father Christmas to endear them to the local community.”

— Marianne Cronin

40. “I really am fine,” Humphrey said in the corridor. “I just got old by accident.”

— Marianne Cronin

41. “The book I recommend to people the most is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi; it’s incredible and has the most beautiful ending, and I love a good ending. More recently I loved Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, which also has those same interconnectedness and time-spanning elements as Homegoing and, again, a beautiful ending. I really enjoyed Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being; it’s.”

— Marianne Cronin

42. “Try as I might, I have no memory of what we did the rest of the day, or even of saying goodbye, because it’s blended in with all my other visits and all the other goodbyes. Sometimes I try to trick myself into remembering, to observe the day casually from the side, trying to get it to roll itself around and reveal to me what we did or said when the visit came to an end. But I can’t.”

— Marianne Cronin

43. “Your heart is beating and your eyes are seeing and your ears are hearing. You’re sitting in this room completely alive. And so you’re not dying. You’re living.”

— Marianne Cronin

44. “Right above my head, on the shelf made out of sockets and switches, is the hospital’s kind reminder of my impermanence. A whiteboard that says Lenni Petersson in red marker with a smudge near the final n. The thing about whiteboards is that they’re so easily wiped clean. They’re designed to be used again and again and again for the names of the unlucky few who find themselves in the May Ward. One day, in just the briefest stroke of a dry whiteboard eraser, I’ll be gone.”

— Marianne Cronin

45. “Having heard screaming and banging, I stood in the doorway of their bedroom, and in the silence I watched my mother watch my father and I wondered if they knew, between them, how to fix him.”

— Marianne Cronin

46. “And Lenni, when you get to heaven,” he said. Her eyes opened. “Give ’em hell.”

— Marianne Cronin

47. “I just got old by accident.”

— Marianne Cronin

48. “There are some words in the Lord’s Prayer that I don’t know. But I do know the word art. It’s a necessary inclusion, I think. We should all be artists. Especially if God is doing art in heaven; we should follow his example.”

— Marianne Cronin

49. “I sat there for perhaps an hour or two trying to decipher the reason for my tears – was it the fact that I had my plans thwarted? That I didn’t get to see Father Arthur? The fact that Jacky didn’t care that I am dying? Or the fact that I’m dying? Or, perhaps, I realized, I was crying because I live in a place where dying doesn’t make you special.”

— Marianne Cronin

50. “She squinted her eyes, as if somewhere between her open and closed eyelids lived the images from so many years ago, as though she’d be able to see herself, if only she could get the gaps between her lashes just right.”

— Marianne Cronin