Justin Cronin

And then, despite all these concerns, Arnette felt her mind begin to loosen, the images of the day unwinding inside her like a spool of thread, pulling her down into sleep.

Never a good sign, he thought, when the crows showed up.

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 perheps someday someone will say those very words about you, Peter. What do you say to that?

Behind every great hatred is a love story.

So, at the last, a story.

What is home but a place where you are truly known?

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings.

Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'."To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.

The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain__ you pretty, ain__ you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass............Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. Your old life ended, and the train took you away to another...

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.

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.

For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing but his parent__ lives are changing too. Like a habitat, abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are. For 18 years he has experienced their existence only in so far as it is 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?

City of memories, city of mirrors.

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

Absolution is not the same as understanding.

Last night they came again. The soldiers had set up a defense perimeter, but there were simply too many__hey must have come by the hundreds of thousands, a huge swarm that blotted out the stars. Three soldiers killed, as well as Cole. He was standing right in front of me; they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury.