The Twelve (The Passage, #2)

by 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.

He still had the young person’s predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was.

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.” Grey nodded. What was there to say?

The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.

What else could you have done? But Kittridge knew his answer. He’d always known. “I could have held his hand.”

“When I look at you, I think of one word. The word is ‘hepatitis.’

The world might despise us, Guilder thought; what will it do when we’re gone?

“I’ve got you,” he said, hugging Tim fiercely; and again, over and over, so that the boy would be hearing these words. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

Only in motion was there safety; every stop felt fraught with peril.

Nitia and Siri and their cousin Carson, just turned twelve but still so slight his feet dangled three inches above the floor; Bab and Dunk Withers, the twins; the Francis girls, Rena and Jules, seated at the rear so they wouldn’t have to pay attention to the boys; little Jenny Apgar, riding on her older brother Gunnar’s lap; Dean and Amelia Wright, the two of them old enough

She was simultaneously experiencing them for the first time while also remembering them—she was both actor and observer—with

It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained—they all swirled together in the mind like a soup.

and like any mystery, it said as much about the seer as the seen.