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

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

— Justin Cronin

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

— Justin Cronin

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

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.

— Justin Cronin

It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them, we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust.

— Justin Cronin

It's not that I don't believe you," Peter managed. "I'm sorry. It's just that...it's only a story."" Perhaps." She shrugged. "And perhaps someday someone will say those very words about you, Peter. What do you say to that?

— Justin Cronin

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 dined about it.

— Justin Cronin

It was like leading people to the edge of a cliff, showing them the view, and then shoving them off.

— Justin Cronin

It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him, she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.

— Justin Cronin