Audrey Niffenegger
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?Collection: Life
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.Collection: Love
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?Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Sadness
Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.Collection: Moving
Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Mean
It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.Collection: Love
I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Real
Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.Collection: Sleep
that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flawsCollection: Love You
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.Collection: Love
It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Sorry
Why is love intensified by absence?Collection: Life
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.Collection: Christian
we both smile and we are conspirators.Collection: Conspirators
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Girl
Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.Collection: Facts
I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.Collection: Dark
My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.Collection: Book
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 believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.Collection: Girl
Everything seems simple until you think about it.Collection: Simple
The cure might be worse than the problemCollection: Might
I feel that I an everything to her.Collection: Feels
Do you ever miss him? Every day. Every minute. Every minute, she says. Yes, it's that way, isn't it?Collection: Missing
When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.Collection: Over You
The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Running
Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.Collection: Memories
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. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art.Collection: Art
My family isn't posh; they're musicians.Collection: Musician
When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain befor you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses.Collection: Night
Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it’s a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.Collection: Pain
I think play must have been invented so we wouldn't go mad thinking about certain things.Collection: Thinking
That's what alcoholics do. It's in their job description: fall apart and then keep falling apart.Collection: Jobs
I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.Collection: Too Late
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.Collection: Beach
I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; 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 air.Collection: Sorry
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.Collection: Married
Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arsonCollection: Husband
I guess no matter what your family is like, you're not surprised.Collection: Matter
Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery at any time at all; that he has never bothered to do so because it's not normal; that he has decided to set aside his fanatical dedication to living like a normal person so I can have a studio big enough to roller-skate across; that I am being an ingrate. "Clare? Earth to Clare..." "Thank you," I say, too abruptly.Collection: Stupid
Mama said, "Dreams are different to real life but important too."Collection: Dream
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, 2001Collection: Baby