Audrey Niffenegger
28 quotes
Biography
"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?"
"Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element."
"I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me."
"There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love."
"It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays."
"It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing."
"Why is love intensified by absence?"
"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?"
"I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret."
"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."
"Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment."
"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."
"There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world."
"I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that."
"We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated."
"one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive."
"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."
"Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning."
"Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude."
"...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath."
"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."
"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."
"I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room"
"My family isn’t posh; they’re musicians."
"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."