Audrey Niffenegger

“It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays behind.”

“I fell asleep. But later that night I woke up. There was moonlight coming through the window, and shadows of tree branches fell onto the bed, waving gently in the breeze.""And then you saw the ghost?"James laughed. "Dear chap, the branches WERE the ghost. There weren't any trees within a hundred yards of that house. They'd all been cut down years before. I saw the ghost of a tree.”

“«Io vorrei Dio. Si può?»Mi sento come un cretino. «Certo che si può. È quello che credi tu.»«Però io non voglio soltanto crederci. Voglio che sia vero.»”

“A me le cose sembrano troppo casuali e prive di significato perché Dio possa esistere davvero.”

“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.”

“I hate to be where sheis not,when she is not. And yet I am always going, and she cannot follow.”

“Franz Schulze’s book “Fantastic Images” had a lot of impact on me. Mark Pascale turned me on to that book when I was twenty years old. It was really interesting to see all this art in one place and to have somebody articulate a theory of Chicago art since I already had a real predilection towards Dada and Surrealism. Chicago is just teeming with kooky, whacked-out artists, and I’m one of them in my own sedate way.”

“Dreams are important to me because they are so irrational. I’m attracted to things which seem to fit together but don’t in fact make any sense. Dreams didn’t really have a lot to do with the novel whereas “The Adventuress,” which was my first visual book, is almost entirely based on dreams. I had ten more or less random drawings and then I thought well, I’ll make a plot that connects all of them. “The Three Incestuous Sisters” was kind of the same. The three characters appeared in a dream and I knew who they were.”

“[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.”

“[S]urrealism is my favorite fun thing. My feeling has always been why make something that merely replicates reality when you can have reality. My own interest lies in things that are impossible in some way.”

“I think that a lot of people have a longing to move out of the present. The present is very constricting. You can’t go back to your past, you can’t go ahead to see what’s in your future, so you have to put up with whatever is here now. People have a deep longing to think about something else and move into a fictional world and also to feel there are other possibilities than just everyday reality. I don’t think time travel is actually possible, but as a metaphor it is interesting.”

“Clare on Henry:Do you ever wonder if I'm real? Maybe I'm dreaming of you. Maybe you're dreaming of me; maybe we only exist in each other's dreams and every morning when we wake up we forget all about each other.”

“Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea and women wait for them, standing on the edge of the water, standing in the horizon for the tiny ship.”

“The hell with virtue. I've figured out the mechanics of her dress.”

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

“He didn't take care of you; you had to take care of yourself.”

“Dažreiz es priecājos, kad Henrijs ir prom, bet, kad viņš atgriežas, es priecājos vienmēr.”

“When I am dead, stop waiting and be free. Of me — put me deep inside you and then go out in the world and live. Love the world and yourself in it. Move though it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”

“If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice.”

“Time is nothing.”

“He saw things he had no words for.”

“The best love is the kind that weakens the soul, that makes us reach for more. That plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.”

“When we met I was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too.”

“Here all of nature was captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that seemed as timeless as if ordered by God, perhaps a God who had mislaid the original paperwork on the Creation and had requested the Field Museum staff to help him out and keep track of it all.”

“Dream are different than real life but important too.”

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

“Time is nothing - Henry's Letter to Claire”

“Being in love is…anxious,” he said. “Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is…you’re naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all…I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her”

“When somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense?”

“We were royally miserable together.”

“As I stand in the elevator, dazed, I realise that a massive winning lottery ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present, and I start to laugh. I cross the lobby, and as I run down the stairs to the street I see Clare running across Washington Square, jumping and whooping, and I am near tears and I don't know why.”

“Alba, it's okay,' Clare says softly. She looks at me. 'Say the poem about lovers on the carpet.'I blank, and then I remember. I feel self-conscious reciting Rilke in front of all these people, and so I begin: 'Engel!: Es wäre ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen-''Say it in English,' Clare interrupts.'Sorry.”

“One may do many things in a long life. I also played a great deal of tennis and brought up three children. There's time for all sorts of adventures.”

“And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people they knew who lingered in the world of the uninitiated. "What was it like?" they asked each friend. The answers were vague. Sex was a private joke: you had to be there.”

“Who knew the angel of sex would be so sad? ~ Time Traveler’s Wife”

“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.”

“Sonunda kaybetseniz bile hayatta kısa bir süreliğine çok mutlu olmak, bir ömür boyu orta karar yaşamaktan daha iyi değil mi?"-Clare”

“...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 as air”

“Not because they’re dead. Though unattainability is always attractive.”

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

“As I penetrate Clare she looks at me and I think I don’t exist and a second later she turns her head and sees me. She cries out, not loudly, and looks back at me, above her, in her. Then she remembers, accepts it, this is pretty strange but it’s okay, and in this moment I love her more than life.”

“I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”

“Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I am always glad when he come's back”

“-Varbūt es tevi izsapņoju. Varbūt tu izsapņo mani; varbūt mēs eksistējam tikai viens otra sapņos un katru rītu, kad pamostamies, viens otru aizmirstam.”

“It's hard being left behind...It's hard to be the one who stays...Why is love intensified by absence?”

“Víz alatt élek. Minden lassú és távoli. Tudom, hogy odafenn van egy világ, egy napsütötte, gyors világ, ahol az idő úgy pereg, ahogyan homokórában a száraz homok, de itt lenn, ahol én vagyok, levegő és hang és idő és érzés mind sűrű és vastag.(Az időutazó felesége)”

“Everything is still out there: the rooftops and chimneys, the graffiti, the office towers and the cyclists; soon there will be sheep and that immense sky the keep out in the countryside... Once I thought there were two realities, inner and outer, but perhaps that's a bit meagre; I'm not quite the same person I was last night...”

“This spirit, this feeling that things aren't right and, in fact, things are so wrong than the only thing we can do is say Fuck It, over and over again, really loud until someone stops us.”

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

“It's living up to being happy that's the most difficult part.”