Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and 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?”
“Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”
“I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me.”
“It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.”
“It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
“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.”
“Why is love intensified by absence?”
“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.”
“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.”
“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?”
“I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“But you make me happy. It's living up to being happy that's the difficult part.”
“Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.”
“Do you ever miss him?Every day. Every minute.Every minute, she says. Yes, it's that way, isn't it?”
“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.”
“I love. I have loved. I will love.”
“I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble”
“Sometimes I'm happy when he's gone, but I'm always happy when he returns. -Clare”
“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.”
“that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws”
“I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.”
