Top 126 Quotes & Sayings by Audrey Niffenegger - Page 2

I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved

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.

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?

CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.

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.

There's always world enough and time.

It's funny how we like labels. If I ever have a bookstore, I'm not going to put any labels on the sections.

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.

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.

Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger.

Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you're dead?

But you make me happy. It's living up to being happy that's the difficult part.

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.

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.

It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

?I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.

I've noticed that Henry needs an incredible amount of physical activity all the time in order to be happy. It's like hanging out with a greyhound.

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

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.

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.

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 arson

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.

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.

I guess no matter what your family is like, you're not surprised.

Everything seems simple until you think about it.

absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

The cure might be worse than the problem

My family isn't posh; they're musicians.

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 Symmetry

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.

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.

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.

We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.

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.

And Clare, always Clare.

When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.

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.

Mama said, "Dreams are different to real life but important too."

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.

My reflection in the mirror shows me pink and puffy. I thought pregnant women were to supposed to glow. I am not glowing.

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.

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.

There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

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.

...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.

That's what alcoholics do. It's in their job description: fall apart and then keep falling apart.

You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried.

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.

My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

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.

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

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.

Do you ever miss him? Every day. Every minute. Every minute, she says. Yes, it's that way, isn't it?

I don't want to boss anyone and I don't want to be bossed.

...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.