Audrey Niffenegger
That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living. In a few minutes we’ll be worrying about names for the children.Collection: Children
What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Real
I don't want to boss anyone and I don't want to be bossed.Collection: Boss
The kissed surprised him because it had been so long since he'd kissed anyone but Elspeth. It surprised Valentina because she had hardly ever kissed anyone that way - to her, kissing had always been more theoretical than physical. Afterwards she stood with her eyes closed, lips parted, face tilted. Robert thought, She's going to break my heart and I'm going to let her.Collection: Eye
We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.Collection: Insane
I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever lovedCollection: Book
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.Collection: Night
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?Collection: Men
But you make me happy. It's living up to being happy that's the difficult part.Collection: You Make Me Happy
It's funny how we like labels. If I ever have a bookstore, I'm not going to put any labels on the sections.Collection: Bookstores
Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you're dead?Collection: Fancy
How does it feel? I feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home. 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.Collection: Running
CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.Collection: Smell
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.Collection: Dangerous Situations
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.Collection: Teenage
You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried.Collection: Mets
Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Children
In the dim light of the computer screen he seemed otherworldly; Julia thought him beautiful, though she knew it was the beauty of damage.Collection: Beautiful
It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly.Collection: Silly
absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark birdCollection: Dark
I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.Collection: Beautiful
Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whoosing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress.Collection: Laughter
Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs, turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey. I'm home. I'm home.Collection: Country
What are you doing?" Nothing. Breaking and entering. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.Collection: Men
What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa.Collection: Tabula Rasa
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 it.Collection: Skills
When somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense?Collection: Hurt
Sometimes I'm happy when he's gone, but I'm always happy when he returns. -ClareCollection: Gone
...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.Collection: Heart
He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
Love you..." Henry-" Always..." Oh God oh God-" World enough..." No!" And time..." Henry!Collection: Love You
Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger.Collection: Ideas
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 SymmetryCollection: Too Much
...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.Collection: Emotional
I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Hair
My reflection in the mirror shows me pink and puffy. I thought pregnant women were to supposed to glow. I am not glowing.Collection: Reflection
He looks sad. Or maybe that's just how he looks when he isn't doing something else with his face.Collection: Looks
The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth.Collection: Wings
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.Collection: Children
I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing roomCollection: Summer
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.Collection: Mom
one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.Collection: Mother
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 long it’s been that way and how do you feel when you wash things and why don’t you do something about it?Collection: Mean
He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn't have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.Collection: Lonely