Audrey Niffenegger Quotes

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

absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

Don't you think 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?

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.

Sometimes a thing is—too much—and it has to be isolated and put away." Martin shrugged. "So what's in the boxes is—emotion. In the form of objects."-Her Fearful Symmetry

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

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

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

Everything seems simple until you think about it.

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

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.

There's always world enough and time.

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.

...she could express her soul with that voice, whenver I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology...she could really hear, she understood structure and she could analyze exactly what it was about a piece of music that had to be rendered just so...she was a very emotional person, Annette. She brought that out in other people. After she died I don't think I ever really felt anything again.

I love. I have loved. I will love.

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.

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

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.

I still feel like a castaway, th elast of a once numerous species. It was as though Robinson Crusoe discovered the telltale footprint on the beach and then realized that it was his own. Myself, small as a leaf, thin as water, begins to cry.

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.

He is coming, and I am here.

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

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.

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.

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.

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

Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.

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.

He thanked her and left the house in the mood of a shipwrecked man who has allowed the rescue ship to pass him by.

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.

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.

The pain has left but I know that it has not gone far, that it is sulking somewhere in a corner or under the bed and it will jump out when I least expect it.

I think play must have been invented so we wouldn't go mad thinking about certain things.

You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried.

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.

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

It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly.

The cure might be worse than the problem

I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn't like it, but it's true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving children of India.

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. As I run I displace air, and things come and go around me, and the path moves like a filmstrip beneath my feet.

Do you ever miss him? Every day. Every minute. Every minute, she says. Yes, it's that way, isn't it?

We are walking down the street holding hands. There is a playground at the end of the block, and I run to the swings and I climb on and Henry takes the one next to me facing the opposite direction. And we swing higher and higher passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast that it seems we are going to collide. And 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.

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.

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.

‎I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.

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

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

Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.