Audrey Niffenegger Quotes

“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, The Time Traveler's Wife

“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.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“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.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The Garden Under Snow "
Now the garden is under snow
a blank page our footprints write on
clare who was never mine
but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty
a crystalline blanket
this is her spring
this is her sleeping/awakening
she is waiting
everything is waiting
the improbable shapes of roots
my baby
her face
a garden, waiting.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“It's not good to know things ahead. It screws up your life.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“We dance. The music runs through me, waves of sound that grab me by the spine, that move my feet my hips my shoulders without consulting my brain.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The music crashes in to a wall and stops.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I wonder if I'm a bigamist?" Clare is eating something pistachio- coloured that has several large shrimp poised over it as though they are nearsighted old men reading a newspaper.

"I think you're allowed to marry the same person as many times as you want," Charisse says.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I close my eyes and all I can think of is red. So I get a tube of watercolour, cadmium red dark, and I get a big mop of a brush, and I fill a jar with water, and I begin to cover the paper with red. It glistens. The paper is limp with moisture, and it darkens as it dries. I watch it drying. It smells of gum arabic. In the centre of the paper, very small, in black ink, I draw a heart, not a silly Valentine but an anatomically-correct heart, tiny, doll-like, and then veins, delicate road-map of veins, that reach all the way to the edges of the paper, that hold the small heart enmeshed like a fly in a spiderweb. See, there's his heartbeat.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I place my finger on her forehead and say, "vanish", but it is she who will stay; I am the one who is vanishing.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I find myself in a dark hallway. At the end of the hall is a door, slightly open with white light spilling around its edges. The hall is full of galoshes and rain coats. I walk slowly and silently to the door and carefully look in to the next room. Morning light fills up the room and is painful at first, but as my eyes adjust I see that in the room is a plain wooden table next to a window. A woman sits at the table facing the window. A teacup sits at her elbow. Outside is the lake, the waves rush up the shore and recede with calming repetition which becomes like stillness after a few minutes. The woman is extremely still. Something about her is familiar. She is an old woman; her hair is perfectly white and lies long on her back in a thin stream, over a slight dowager's hump. She wears a sweater the colour of coral. The curve of her shoulders, the stiffness in her posture says her is someone who is very tired, and I am very tired, myself. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and the floor creaks; the woman turns and sees me and her face is remade in to joy. I am suddenly amazed; this is Clare, Clare old! and she is coming to me, so slowly, and I take her in to my arms.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife