The Time Traveler’s Wife Quotes

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

“Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Why is love intensified by absence?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Time is priceless, but it’s Free. You can't own it, you can use it. You can spend it. But you can't keep it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“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

“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

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

“I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

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

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

“I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

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

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

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

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

“But you make me happy. It's living up to being happy that's the difficult part.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“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

“Do you ever miss him?
Every day. Every minute.
Every minute, she says.
Yes, it's that way, isn't it?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

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

“I love. I have loved. I will love.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

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

“Sometimes I'm happy when he's gone, but I'm always happy when he returns. -Clare”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“‎I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife