Justin Cronin

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

— Justin Cronin

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

— Justin Cronin

I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to. What dark passages.

— Justin Cronin

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

— Justin Cronin

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

— Justin Cronin

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

— Justin Cronin

Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

— 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

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

— Justin Cronin

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

— 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

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

— Justin Cronin