Quotes from The Time Traveler's Wife

“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, quote from 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, quote from The Time Traveler's Wife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, quote from The Time Traveler's Wife

About the author

Popular quotes

“Life alone is precious, but conscious thought is the greatest gift the universe offers.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, quote from The Reality Dysfunction

“He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one hand and also in flight, arcing in a blur toward the glove. What the camera had caught was two instants in one: time separated and unified, the ball in two places at once, an eventuation as inexplicable as the Trinity itself. Francis now took the picture to be a Trinitarian talisman (a hand, a glove, a ball) for achieving the impossible: for he had always believed it impossible for him, ravaged man, failed human, to reenter history under this roof. Yet here he was in this acne of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught.
But the ball is really not yet caught, except by the camera, which has frozen only its situation in space.
And Francis is not yet ruined, except as an apparency in process.
The ball still flies.
Francis still lives to play another day.
Doesn't he?”
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“If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don't want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she's willing to do? You can't.”
― Adam Levin, quote from The Instructions

“Having the job makes it easier,” he said, sitting opposite her. “Keeps my mind off things.” He would not say anything about his spy operation. “My job isn’t helping me at all.” She waved her hand up, then let it flop back onto her arm. “Job?” Marco asked. “Taking care of my grandmother and sister,” Shay said. “My grandmother’s diabetic. She needs insulin shots. And my sister is just, well.” Shay looked at him, eyebrows raised. “You have a little sister?” “I’m the little brother, so you’ll get no sympathy from me.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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