The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Quotes collated February 2013 


"The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life."
- Derek Walcott -

It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.
Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?

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?

"...because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us... Us, the most fleeting of all.
...Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? ...above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love, -just what is wholly unsayable."
- The Ninth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell -

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.

I sat on the back porch in my pajamas with Mom and Dad and Mrs. and Mr. Kim, drinking lemonade and watching the blueness of the evening sky, listening to the cicadas and the TV noises from other apartments.

I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I loved, remember wanting to crawl into it and sleep.

It's early, about six in the morning and I'm sleeping the thin dreamy sleep of six in the morning...

So I went to school and we did adding and mealworms and language arts and after lunch French and music and religion. I worried all day about pants for the man cause he seemed like he really wanted pants.

"Very few people ever believe me, either. Especially doctors. Doctors don't believe anything unless you can prove it to them."

On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons.

He is standing with his back to me, and we look at each other in the mirror. Poor small self...

A translucent moment. I didn't understand, and then I did, just like that. I watch it happen. I want to be both of us at once, feel again the feeling of losing the edges of my self, of seeing the admixture of future and present for the first time. But I'm too accustomed, too comfortable with it, and so I am left on the outside, remembering the wonder of being nine and suddenly seeing, knowing, that my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only me. The loneliness of it.

It was as though Robinson Crusoe discovered the telltale footprint on the beach and then realized that it was his own. My self, small as a leaf, thin as water, begins to cry. I hold him, hold me, for a long time.

"Immer wieder." Always again, always the same.

und so weiter

...everything shimmers, iridescent, butter fly-wing colors...

I think I know what she wished for; I think she wished not to get any taller. That's what I would wish if I were her, anyway. Mary Christina is the tallest person in our class. She's 5'9".

...always experimenting, always attempting the coup d'eclat.

Now she can take my bishop but she'll lose her queen in the process. It takes Clare a moment to realize this and when she does she sticks out her tongue at me. Her tongue is a worrisome shade of orange from all the Doritos she's eaten.

She's a child, and then again she isn't.

I am afraid of the future; it seems to be a big box waiting for me.

determinism

Bismarck

Whenever Clare mentions God my palms start to sweat and I have an urge to hide or run or vanish.

...and I don't know what to say to this Clare who is old and young and different from other girls, who knows that different might be hard. But Clare doesn't seem to expect an answer. She leans against my arm, and I put my arm around her shoulders.

The room is silent, and I look over Helen's shoulder and see that all the girls have gathered around us, and they are all looking. Helen straightens up, and looks back at them, and says, "Well?" and someone in the back starts to clap, and they are all clapping, and laughing, and talking, and cheering, and I feel light, light as air.

Without moving anything but my eyes, I look at Clare. She is deep in her drawing. When Clare draws she looks as though the world has fallen away, leaving only her and the object of her scrutiny. This is why I love to be drawn by Clare: when she looks at me with that kind of attention, I feel that I am everything to her. It's the same look she gives me when we're making love.

She wears cloth coats and loafers with Capri pants. She is dark-haired with a dramatic face, a full mouth, wide eyes, short hair; she looks Italian but actually she's Jewish. My mom wears lipstick, eye liner, mascara, blush, and eyebrow pencil to go to the dry cleaner's. Dad is much as he always is, tall, spare, a quiet dresser, a wearer of hats. The difference is his face. He is deeply content.

I stare at Clare, standing before me, and I am sorry to be here, sorry to ruin her Christmas.
"Oh, Henry! I'm so glad you're here, and, you know, I'd rather know—I mean, you just come out of nowhere, and disappear, and if I know things, about your life, you seem more... real. Even terrible things. I need to know as much as you can say."

At Buckingham Fountain I stand until the cold becomes unbearable watching seagulls wheeling and diving, fighting over a loaf of bread somebody has left for them. A mounted policeman rides slowly around the fountain once and then sedately continues south. I walk.

I've noticed lately that my sense of time passing is different; it seems to run slower than other people's. An afternoon can be like a day to me; an El ride can be an epic journey. Today is interminable.

This is good, I'm taking care of myself, I'm not being an idiot, I'm remembering to eat dinner.

I have a sudden glimpse of all the Christmases of my life lined up one after another, waiting to be gotten through, and despair floods me. No. 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 as air.

I don't want to go home. I want to be with people, I want to be distracted.

I walk into it like a drowning man, which is what I have come here to be. 

I have been refusing to meet Ingrid's parents for months. I have refused to go to Christmas dinner at their house tomorrow. There's no way I'm going to do this for Mia, whom I hardly know.

...things are different with us. I want something...! want Henry to say something, do something that proves this hasn't all been some kind of elaborate joke. I want. That's all. I am wanting.

My grandmother's room is comforting but claustrophobic... it smells of powder and dentures and old skin.

"Oh, Mama's waving; wave back."

"Let's go and say hello."
The oak trees still aren't very big, only about fifteen feet tall. Grandma puts her hand on the trunk of the middle one and says, "Hello." I don't know if she's addressing the tree or her brother.

"So you're the one," Grandma says.
"Yes," Henry replies, and this Yes falls into my ears like balm. Yes.

It's evening. I look up; Grandma seems to be asleep. I stop reading, and close the book. Her eyes open.
"Hello," I say.
"Do you ever miss him?" she asks me. "Every day. Every minute."
"Every minute," she says. "Yes. It's that way, isn't it?" She turns on her side and burrows into the pillow.
"Good night," I say, turning out the lamp. As I stand in the dark looking down at Grandma in her bed, self-pity floods me as though I have been injected with it. It's that way, isn't it? Isn't it.

She has such a kind face that I have an urge to confide something, anything, to her, just to see her reaction.

"The shopping part I can do. It's the assembly that perplexes."

"My kittens, I have brought you a new toy," Gomez intones. "It answers to the name of Henry, but you can call it Library Boy"
"It cooks! Dinner is saved! Have another beer!"

We cross from the alley to Ann Sather's Swedish Restaurant's parking lot. The attendant mutely regards us as we traverse his kingdom. 

We... read the menus, even though, as lifelong Chicagoans, we could probably sing them from memory in two-part harmony.

"With Henry, I can see everything laid out, like a map, past and future, everything at once, like an angel"

Charisse knocks on the door, asking if I've died in here and can she please brush her teeth? As I wrap my hair in a towel I see myself blurred in the mirror by steam and time seems to fold over onto itself and I see myself as a layering of all my previous days and years and all the time that is coming and suddenly I feel as though I've become invisible. But then the feeling is gone as fast as it came and I stand still for a minute and then I pull on my bathrobe and open the door and go on. 

Everything is subtly different on this side of the bed. It's like when you close one eye and look at something close up for a while, and then look at it from the other eye.

He is exhausted, and yet sleeps as though at any moment he may jump up and run. Do I radiate this much tension? I guess so. Clare complains that I don't relax until I'm dead tired, but actually I am often relaxed when I'm with her.

Traffic is backed up on Dearborn, making a concert of engine noises, and the sky is gray, slowly lightening into gray.

...reminding my poor knees and ankles that their life's work is to carry me far and fast on demand.

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'm flying now, that golden feeling, as if I could run right into the air, and I'm invincible, nothing can stop me, nothing can stop me, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing—.

Henry walks fast and I am always a little out of breath when we walk together. I've noticed that he makes an effort to match my pace, now.

...I move as in a dream to find the Henry who is my here and now.

It doesn't help that he didn't run this morning; 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. It's different being with Henry in real time.

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.

... Henry slips around me and stands in the middle of the rug just looking and when he turns to me I see that he doesn't recognize anything; nothing in the room means a thing to him, and the knife of realization sinks in deeper: all the little tokens and souvenirs in this museum of our past are as love letters to an illiterate.

...smiles in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy.

"To happiness. To here and now."
"To world enough and time,"

"He's really cute."
"Jimmy Stewart?"
"Him too. I meant your guy. Henry."
I grin. I am as proud as if I had made Henry myself. "Yeah."

Jimmy offers Donna the moon, and Donna accepts.

There's an elaborate stable scene with Mary and Joseph and their entourage to the right of the altar. 

...and into this quiet comes a long, slow, low note that fills the space, that connects to no known piece of music but simply exists, sustains. Alicia is bowing as slowly as it is possible for a human to bow, and the sound she is producing seems to emerge from nowhere, seems to originate between my ears, resonates through my skull...

...if there is a God, then God, let me just stand here quietly and inconspicuously, here and now, here and now.

It's so hard to stay mad at her when she is my familiar, lovely Mama.

"I mean... the worst thing is that she's gone. So it's good that she's out there. Even if I can't see her."

"...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."

There's a playground at the end of the block and I run to the swings and 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 it seems like we're 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.

Her voice is like butter. I want to wrap myself in her voice and go to sleep.

"Ah." Ben has a way of taking in a problem, just accepting it, which I find very soothing.

As I float on the surface of waking I can't find myself in time; is it Christmas, Thanksgiving? Is it third grade, again?

I swam up to her and she was surprised to see me there, she said Why Clare, I thought you were getting married today, and I suddenly realized, the way you do in dreams, that I couldn't get married to Henry if I was a mermaid, and I started to cry, and then I woke up and it was the middle of the night.

“What is it? My dear?"
"Ah, how can we bear it?" "Bear what?"
"This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"
"We can be quiet together, and pretend—since it is only the beginning—that we have all the time in the world." "And every day we shall have less. And then none." "Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"
"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."
—A. S. Byatt, Possession

The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.

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...
I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving. And what of Henry, my Odysseus? Henry is an artist of another sort, a disappearing artist.

Every visit was an event. Now every absence is a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will hear about when my adventurer materializes at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking. Now I am afraid when he is gone.

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

The next evening I'm standing in the doorway of Clare's studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she's trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.

Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery anytime 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.

I decide to inquire about the method in Henry's madness.
"What the hell," I ask, politely, "are you doing?”

His voice is final, the voice of one who has seen the future, and has no plans to mess with it.

After about ten minutes I wanted to push my hands through the screen and get at the real thing in there, whatever it was. I like to do things directly, touch the textures, see the colors.

Then I begin to peruse the shelves dreamily, inhaling the deep dusty smell of paper, glue, old carpets and wood.

...Clare looks up at me and says, "Henry, look, it's Pompeii." She holds out the tiny book of picture postcards, and something in her voice says, "See, I have chosen you".

fait accompli

In Kendrick's light eyes is a sadness that I want to undo; after laying everything before him I want to take it all back and leave, excuse him from the burden of having to think about any of this.

So I was simply not thinking about a lot of important stuff because I was completely drunk with the notion of a baby... a sort of dumpling baby, gurgling and laughing at everyday stuff, a monkey baby, a small cooing sort of baby.

My body wanted a baby. I felt empty and I wanted to be full. I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.

...it dawns on me that this is what is going on, this is what it is called, and the word expands in my head until it fills all crevices of my mind, until it has crowded out every other thought. I start to cry. After they've done everything they could, it happens anyway.

I feel his stubble against my cheek and I am rubbed raw, not on my skin but deep in me, a wound opens and Henry's face is wet but with whose tears?

The heart asks pleasure first; And then excuse from pain... She stands in front of the bright yellow poem and seems to warm herself by it.

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

All night the cicadas and the tree frogs of my childhood pulsed their electric curtain of sound...

The world is gray. Slowly color leaks into it, not rosy-fingered but like a slowly spreading stain of blood orange...

Light finds the window, and creates my hands...

...a ship of summer swimming through my winter vision. 

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller...
Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.

By entirely separate processes we have arrived at the same condition.

But all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. The only thing my need could do was bring me to her.

It's one of those winter evenings when the coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time, like the narrow center of an hourglass which time itself flows through, but slowly, slowly.

Why not me, Henry?
Why only Alba? But as usual there's no answer to this. As usual, that's just how it is.

It is only my memory that holds me here. Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.