Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)

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But as usual there's no answer to this. As usual, that's just how it is.

Audrey Niffenegger
Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger.

Audrey Niffenegger
I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble

Audrey Niffenegger
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

Audrey Niffenegger
But you make me happy. It's living up to being happy that's the difficult part.

Audrey Niffenegger
When somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense?

Audrey Niffenegger
Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whoosing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress.

Audrey Niffenegger
Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.

Audrey Niffenegger
I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I'm sorry" until it is as meaningless air.

Audrey Niffenegger
What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa.

Audrey Niffenegger
He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.

Audrey Niffenegger
She looks up at me, still rocking. Henry... why did me decide to do this again? Supposedly when it's over they hand you a baby and let you keep it. Oh yeah. —Wednesday, September 5, 2001

Audrey Niffenegger
I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.

Audrey Niffenegger
Clare takes a mouthful, swallows it in a businesslike fashion, and says, Well, that's not so bad.
That's a twenty-something-dollar bottle of wine.
Oh. Well, that was marvelous.

Audrey Niffenegger
I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I'm gone. It's like marrying a policeman.

Audrey Niffenegger
Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.

Audrey Niffenegger
Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it's a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.

Audrey Niffenegger
We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.

Audrey Niffenegger
Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery at any time at all; that he has never bothered to do so because it's not normal; that he has decided to set aside his fanatical dedication to living like a normal person so I can have a studio big enough to roller-skate across; that I am being an ingrate. "Clare? Earth to Clare..." "Thank you," I say, too abruptly.

Audrey Niffenegger
I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.

Audrey Niffenegger
Henry loves my hair almost as though it is a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back.

Audrey Niffenegger
The choices we're working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can't know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it's all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

Audrey Niffenegger
CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

Audrey Niffenegger
You can still be cool when you're dead. In fact, it's much easier, because you aren't getting old and fat and losing your hair.

Audrey Niffenegger
I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.

Audrey Niffenegger
I've noticed that Henry needs an incredible amount of physical activity all the time in order to be happy. It's like hanging out with a greyhound.

Audrey Niffenegger
Maybe I'm dreaming you. Maybe you're dreaming me; maybe we only exist in each other's dreams and every morning when we wake up we forget all about each other.

Audrey Niffenegger
Love you..." Henry-" Always..." Oh God oh God-" World enough..." No!" And time..." Henry!

Audrey Niffenegger
My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.

Audrey Niffenegger
Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.

Audrey Niffenegger