The voices / 64 fragments

Audrey Niffenegger

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Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Archive entries

01Undated

There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

02Undated

I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

03Undated

It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

04Undated

It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

05Undated

Why is love intensified by absence?

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

06Undated

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

07Undated

Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

08Undated

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. 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. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

09Undated

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

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

10Undated

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

11Undated

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

12Undated

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

13Undated

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

14Undated

Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

15Undated

The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

16Undated

one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

17Undated

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.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

18Undated

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

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

19Undated

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

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

20Undated

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.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

21Undated

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

22Undated

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.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

23Undated

Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude.

Audrey Niffenegger / quote

24Undated

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

Audrey Niffenegger / quote