Cronin Quotes & Sayings

In junior high, I was still writing poems and stories. In college, I was a journalism major. When I got out of college, I went to work for an educational publisher, so I was still writing, developing curriculums. — Doreen Cronin

If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it. — Justin Cronin

How strange it was ... , one minute you were all alone with your thoughts, the next somebody came along who seemed to know the deepest part of you, who could open you like a book. — Justin Cronin

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? — Justin Cronin

The long-lived K meson was discovered at Brookhaven. — James Cronin

I've never stopped and never ever will. But the words got tangled up somewhere between his mouth and his brain, and the moment slipped away. — Justin Cronin

They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I'm here to say that it's not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be. — Justin Cronin

I was born, in a crossfire hurricane — Sean Cronin

And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways. — 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

Even if my country remains in war with yours ... remember ... i am not your enemy. — A.J. Cronin

Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed. — Justin Cronin

Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand - once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over. — Justin Cronin

To know and be known: that was the final desire, the heart of love. — Justin Cronin

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write. — Doreen Cronin

Below lies the dark core, that great iron ball beneath all things. Its compressed weight is fantastic; it is older than time itself. It is a vestige of the blackness that predates all existence, when a formless universe existed in a state of chaotic un-creation, lacking awareness even of itself. — Justin Cronin

Weren't the question the man had wrong, it was his way of asking it. — Justin Cronin

All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us. — Justin Cronin

They always come home. — Justin Cronin

My mother, Dorothy Watson, had met my father in a Greek class at Northwestern University. — James Cronin

Eustace remembered a day like this one: spring on the cusp of summer, the earth unclenching its fist, thick green leaves, rich with fragrance, fattening the trees. A — Justin Cronin

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide. — Justin Cronin

I have a lot of nieces and nephews. I was always around kids. I was like the family babysitter because I was the only one that wasn't married. — Doreen Cronin

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse. — Justin Cronin

We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose. — Justin Cronin

The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you. — Justin Cronin

Nothing is more limiting than a closed circle of acquaintanceship where every avenue of conversation has been explored and social exchanges are fixed in a known routine. — A.J. Cronin

It's love that enslaves us. — Justin Cronin

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf. — Justin Cronin

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid. — Justin Cronin

Duck was a neutral party, so he brought the ultimatum to the cows. — Doreen Cronin

The memory was unpleasant; he'd taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world. — Justin Cronin

It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop. — Justin Cronin

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours. — Justin Cronin

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

Strange how one minute life was a certain way and then it was another, and you couldn't remember what you'd done to make it all happen. — Justin Cronin

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life.
And then, of course, the end of the world happened. — Justin Cronin

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right. — Justin Cronin

Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he's not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people - as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn't the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive. — Justin Cronin

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

Don't be afraid to ask if you're on the right train. — Justin Cronin

The virtue of achievement is victory over oneself. Those who know this can never know defeat. — A.J. Cronin

For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell — Justin Cronin

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known. — Justin Cronin

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings. — Justin Cronin

There was so much feeling in the world. So much sadness. So much longing. So much joy. Everything had a soul. The petals of flowers. The mice of the field. The clouds and rain and the bare limbs of trees. All — Justin Cronin

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person. — Justin Cronin

I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison. — James Cronin

Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry. — Justin Cronin

They had hoped, hated, loved, suffered, sung, and wept. They had known loss. They had surrounded and comforted themselves with objects. They had driven automobiles. They had walked dogs and pushed children on swing sets and waited in line at the grocery store. They had said stupid things. They had kept secrets, nurtured grudges, blown upon the embers of regret. They had worshipped a variety of gods or no god at all. They had awakened in the night to the sound of rain. They had apologized. They had attended various ceremonies. They had explained the history of themselves to psychologists, priests, lovers, and strangers in bars. They had, at unexpected moments, experienced bolts of joy so unalloyed, so untethered to events, that they seemed to come from above; they had longed to be known and, sometimes, almost were. Heirs — Justin Cronin

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book. — Justin Cronin

It's all well and good to save the human race. You could say I'm in favor. But you might want to pay a little more attention to what's right in front of you. — Justin Cronin

It was funny, Grey thought. Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange, the whole idea of time. He'd thought it was one thing but it was actually another. It wasn't a line but a circle, and even more; it was a circle made of circles made of circles, each lying on top of the other, so that every moment was next to every other moment, all at once. And once you knew this you couldn't unknow it. Such as now the way he could see events as they were about to unfold, as if they'd already happened, because in a way they had. — Justin Cronin

She did not believe in fate; the world seemed far chancier than that, a series of mishaps and narrow escapes you somehow managed to survive until, one day, you didn't. — Justin Cronin

There's a power at work here, something beyond our understanding. You can call it what you like. It doesn't need a name, because it knows yours, my friend. — Justin Cronin

As a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? — Leroy Cronin

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

I realize that people won't even download the entire album and might just download a song or two and put it in a playlist for a workout or in the background while people do dishes. That's fine and I can't dictate how people listen to my music, but I structure records the way I listen to records. — Mikal Cronin

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

While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time. — James Cronin

That's the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You're just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else. — Justin Cronin

The world tomorrow is haunted
only by what doesn't happen
now. — M.T.C. Cronin

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad. — Justin Cronin

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer. — Justin Cronin

Religions are many, reason is one, we are all brothers. — A.J. Cronin

She thought she'd hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her. — Justin Cronin

This here is Juan Sweeting, my second," Michael said. "Goes by Ceps." They shook, the man greeting him with a grunt. "How'd you get the name Ceps?" Peter asked. "I haven't heard that before." The man curled his arms, popping a pair of biceps like two large grapefruits. — Justin Cronin

And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day. — Justin Cronin

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality. — Justin Cronin

We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. — Justin Cronin

He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more
a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done. — Justin Cronin

Since our first, furry ancestor scraped flint on stone and banished night with fire, we have climbed heavenward on a ladder made of our own arrogance. — Justin Cronin

History is more than data, more than facts, more than science and scholarship. These things are merely the means to a greater end. History is a story - the story of ourselves. Where do we come from? How have we survived? How can we avoid the mistakes of the past? Do we matter, and if we do, what is our proper place upon the earth? — Justin Cronin

That was always the hardest part, missing you. — Justin Cronin

Flash Floods are about as predictable as a crazy dream after one too many fish tacos - one minutes you're fine, and the next minute a moose is floating past you wearing a fishing hat and ladies' pajamas. — Doreen Cronin

We cannot measure Divine Providence by the yardstick of human mentality. — A.J. Cronin

But she wasn't a little girl, she was a beautiful woman, tall and lovely, with tresses of black hair that curved like cupped hands around her face. — Justin Cronin

There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present. — Justin Cronin

When they come, they come from above. — Justin Cronin

- I miss you, Daddy. I know you do. I miss you, too, sweetheart, more than you'll ever know. I don't think I've ever been happier than I was with you. I wish I could have saved you, Amy. - But you did. You saved me. You were just a little girl, alone in the world. I never should have let them take you. I tried, but not hard enough. That's the real test, you know. That's the true measure of a man's life. I was always too afraid. I hope you can forgive me. A — Justin Cronin

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out. — Justin Cronin

He knew what he'd see; one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long. — Justin Cronin

Because that's what heaven is ... it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there. — Justin Cronin

There's the obvious shift in the tech industry. I'm not really politicized about the whole thing, but it's definitely clear that rent is harder and it's harder for musicians or artists or someone not making a ton of money to live comfortably. — Mikal Cronin

I was much involved in the development of the spark chamber as a practical research tool. — James Cronin

The world had a way of speaking to you if you let it; the trick was learning to hear. — Justin Cronin

I could have held his hand. — Justin Cronin

A baby wasn't an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living. — Justin Cronin

I had some pretty lucky and good living situations; thankfully I never got forced out of an apartment. A lot of my friends got evicted or pushed out and couldn't afford a new place. For me, I wanted more space to set up a home studio, but there was no way to afford that. — Mikal Cronin

What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age? — Justin Cronin

He had entered sleep's antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories; yet part of him was still in the car, listening to the rain. — Justin Cronin

This was their way; a lot was said by saying nothing. She — Justin Cronin

On a fading summer evening, late in the last hours of his old life, Peter Jaxon - son of Demetrius and Prudence Jaxon, First Family; descendent of Terrence Jaxon, signatory of the One Law; great-great-nephew of the one known as Auntie, Last of the First; Peter of Souls, the Man of Days and the One Who Stood - took his position on the catwalk above Main Gate, waiting to kill his brother. — 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

If I had imagined for one second that I could believe in love, I saw now that I'd been deluding myself. Because it all ends up the same, whether you love them or not.
Everyone betrays you, in the end. — Ali Cronin

That was when you got to actually liking people, which was a problem. Things fell apart fast after that. — Justin Cronin

All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As — Justin Cronin

I never considered writing as a career - it was always a creative outlet for me and something I just loved to do. — Doreen Cronin

It is better to have bounced and bumped than never to have bounced at all. — Doreen Cronin

Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step. — Justin Cronin