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bb0d18b
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Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you're dead?
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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1bd4525
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When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.
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time-travel
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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9f479e0
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You didn't answer my question. I asked you about being in love. You said what it was like when your wife went away." Martin sat down again. How young she is. When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing. Julia stood with her hands clenched, as though she wanted to pound an answer out of him. "Being in love is...anxious," he said. "Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to ..
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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a4ee1e4
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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.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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afdd45f
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He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.
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sad
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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3075467
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I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I'm corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody's got to do i..
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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9500101
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I feel that I an everything to her.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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485f80b
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I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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ed6ea89
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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.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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982b04c
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It's hard being left behind...It's hard to be the one who stays...Why is love intensified by absence?
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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73d9d30
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CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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ed9b019
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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 pinin..
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love
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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fc0af4d
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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.
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future
life
place
time
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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f7b16ce
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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.
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choices
free-will
future
god
life
past
present
universe
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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696ec0e
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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.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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1630c16
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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 as air
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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37c212a
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What are you doing?" Nothing. Breaking and entering. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
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henry
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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4fa620b
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That's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws.
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love
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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4a098e5
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I feel like a pink worm in the core of this green room, as though I have eaten my way in and should be working on becoming a butterfly, or something. I'm not real awake, here, at the moment. I hear somebody coughing. I hear my heart beating and the high-pitched sound which is my nervous system doing its thing. Oh, God, let today be a normal day. Let me be normally befuddled, normally nervous; get me to the church on time, in time. Let me no..
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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a1ac085
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He thanked her and left the house in the mood of a shipwrecked man who has allowed the rescue ship to pass him by.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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91668b1
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To world enough and time.
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love
time
world
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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f85696c
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That's the thing about living vicariously; it's so much faster than actual living.
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life
life-quotes
literature
living
quotes
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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62c7a7c
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And Clare, always Clare.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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ecb550b
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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.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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aba25e3
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It seems like we're 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.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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c9570ca
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and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him - Clare
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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8fd9665
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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"
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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05edc92
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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.
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humor
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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57b1dd9
|
I can appreciate that," says Henry. He's adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth... Henry, they're not going to be able to get any of that up here." He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the botto..
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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2e7d745
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I raise my head and see a red illuminated EXIT sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is racing and for a liquor-addled moment I think until I realize that EXIT signs tend to congregate in the twentieth century.
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time-travel
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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aa4f800
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Martin said, "It feels as though part of my self has detached and gone to Amsterdam, where it--she--is waiting for me. Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome?" Julia nodded. "There's pain where she ought to be. It's feeding the other pain, the thing that makes me wash and count and all that. So her absence is stopping me from going to find her. Do you see?"
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love
ocd
pain
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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e5494cb
|
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.
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the-time-traveler-s-wife
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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11ac46e
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He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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34fded9
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I'm curious about things that people aren't supposed to see--so, for example, I liked going to the British Museum, but I would like it better if I could go into all the offices and storage rooms, I want to look in all the drawers and--discover stuff. And I want to know about people. I mean, I know it's probably kind of rude but I want to know why you have all these boxes and what's in them and why all your windows are papered over and how l..
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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420cacc
|
I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room
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happiness
loss
love
memory
mother
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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3614f2b
|
This spirit, this feeling that things aren't right and, in fact, things are so wrong than the only thing we can do is say Fuck It, over and over again, really loud until someone stops us.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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a0ae0ab
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Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.
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appreciation
architecture
chicago
good-stuff
value
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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a302e0c
|
Do you worry sometimes that all the really great stuff has already happened?
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time
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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c8d7a6a
|
Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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d8a6312
|
Being in love is...anxious," he said. "Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is...you're naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all...I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her"
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inspiration
life
love
love-quotes
naked
truth
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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7a6f65e
|
My reflection in the mirror shows me pink and puffy. I thought pregnant women were to supposed to glow. I am not glowing.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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c2c753c
|
I do get tired of humans
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lawyer
|
Audrey Niffenegger |
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11ca30e
|
I think play must have been invented so we wouldn't go mad thinking about certain things.
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Audrey Niffenegger |
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c998f13
|
We didn't think the library was funny looking in it's faux- Greek splendor, nor did we find the cuisine limited or bland, or the movies at the Michigan theater relentlessly American and mindless. These were opinions I came to later, after I became a denizen of a City, an expatriate anxious to distance herself from the bumpkin ways of her youth. I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and beli..
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Audrey Niffenegger |