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

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I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her, and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

Audrey Niffenegger
Absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

Audrey Niffenegger
Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will.

Audrey Niffenegger
But don't you think, I persist, that it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?

Audrey Niffenegger
I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?

Audrey Niffenegger
But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

Audrey Niffenegger
The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances.

Audrey Niffenegger
I'm at a loss because I am in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all. (Time Traveler's Wife)

Audrey Niffenegger
It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: It's just that I thought maybe you were married to me.

Audrey Niffenegger
When we met I was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too.

Audrey Niffenegger
That's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws.

Audrey Niffenegger
I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.

Audrey Niffenegger
We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.

Audrey Niffenegger
I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.

Audrey Niffenegger
My reflection in the mirror shows me pink and puffy. I thought pregnant women were to supposed to glow. I am not glowing.

Audrey Niffenegger
He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn't have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.

Audrey Niffenegger
Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs, turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey. I'm home. I'm home.

Audrey Niffenegger
That's what alcoholics do. It's in their job description: fall apart and then keep falling apart.

Audrey Niffenegger
It's dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

Audrey Niffenegger
When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.

Audrey Niffenegger
I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.

Audrey Niffenegger
I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved

Audrey Niffenegger
Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

Audrey Niffenegger
Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

Audrey Niffenegger
Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.

Audrey Niffenegger
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older.

Audrey Niffenegger
I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.

Audrey Niffenegger
The engagement ring is an emerald, and the dim light from the window is refracted green and white in it. The rings are silver, and they need cleaning. They need wearing, and I know just the girl to wear them.

Audrey Niffenegger