1. “I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.”
2. “The hell with virtue. I’ve figured out the mechanics of her dress.”
3. “that’s what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws”
4. “I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.”
5. “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.”
6. “There’s always world enough and time.”
7. “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?”
8. “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.”
9. “we are all time travelers in our minds, if not in our bodies.”
10. “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.”
11. “Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?”
12. “Henry loves my hair almost as though it is a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back.”
13. “The wedding is tomorrow, but as the groom I don’t seem to have too many responsibilities. Be there; that’s the main item on my To Do list.”
14. “It is only memory that holds me here. Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.”
15. “Tell me, Clare, why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?’”
16. “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.”
17. “My reflection in the mirror shows me pink and puffy. I thought pregnant women were to supposed to glow. I am not glowing.”
18. “Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”
19. “I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.”
20. “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 line up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?”
21. “It’s terrific, Clare,” Henry says, and we stare at each other and I think, “Don’t leave me.”
22. “Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.”
23. “He is coming, and I am here.”
24. “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.”
25. “As always, I had the whole backseat to myself, so I lay down and watched the tall buildings along Lake Shore Drive flicking past the window.”
26. “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?”
27. “It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: ‘It’s just that I thought maybe you were married to me.’”
28. “But don’t you think,” I persist, “that 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?”
29. “Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.”
30. “When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.”
31. “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.”
32. “a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word”
33. “I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I’m gone. It’s like marrying a policeman.”
34. “I stare at Clare, standing before me, and I am sorry to be here, sorry to ruin her Christmas. “I’m sorry, Clare. I didn’t mean to put all this sadness on you. I just find Christmas… difficult.”
35. “We were royally miserable together.”
36. “I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.”
37. “I love you always. Time is nothing.”
38. “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.”
39. “…she smiles in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy”
40. “It’s funny how memory erodes. If all I had to work from where my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp moments standing out.”
41. “I do get tired of humans”
42. “It’s hard being left behind. It’s hard to be the one who stays. Why is love intensified by absence?”
43. “My body wanted a baby. I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always.”
44. “Nor Time, nor Place, nor Chance, nor Death can bow/my least desires unto the least remove”
45. “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.”
46. “But I don’t want to just believe it, I want it to be true.”
47. “I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved.”
48. “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.”
49. “I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. – Henry deTamble”
50. “I place my finger on her forehead and say, “vanish”, but it is she who will stay; I am the one who is vanishing.”
51. “It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
52. “To world enough and time.”
53. “Praise means nothing to Mama, she doesn’t believe it. Only criticism can flush her cheeks and catch her attention. If I were to say something disparaging she would remember it always.”
54. “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.”
55. “I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.”
56. “Oh not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.”
57. “That’s what I love you for: your inability to perceive my hideous flaws.”
58. “When I was growing up Henry came and went, so I always had this intense, unsatisfied feeling. Henry is constantly touching me, kissing me, making love to me. And he tells me things! But the best thing of all is that I know where to find him.”
59. “The heart asks pleasure first; and then excuse from pain.”
60. “No. I lie awake worrying that you might disappear and never come back. I lie awake brooding about some of the stuff I sort of half know about in the future. But I have total faith in the idea that we are supposed to be together.”
61. “one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.”
62. “It’s beautiful.” Clare nods, satisfied, for a moment, that her mother really did love her.”
63. “I close my eyes and all I can think of is red. So I get a tube of watercolour, cadmium red dark, and I get a big mop of a brush, and I fill a jar with water, and I begin to cover the paper with red. It glistens. The paper is limp with moisture, and it darkens as it dries. I watch it drying. It smells of gum arabic. In the centre of the paper, very small, in black ink, I draw a heart, not a silly Valentine but an anatomically-correct heart, tiny, doll-like, and then veins, delicate road-map of veins, that reach all the way to the edges of the paper, that hold the small heart enmeshed like a fly in a spiderweb. See, there’s his heartbeat.”
64. “It’s living up to being happy that’s the most difficult part.”
65. “…all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. ”
66. “It’s hard to be the one who stays.”
67. “I can reach into Henry and touch time… he loves me.”
68. “Why is love intensified by absence?”
69. “This is good, I’m taking care of myself, I’m not being an idiot, I’m remembering to eat dinner.”
70. “How do you know? I mean, if I was making you up, and I didn’t want you to know you were made up, I just wouldn’t tell you, right?”
71. “I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.”
72. “Doctors don’t believe anything unless you can prove it to them.”
73. “Every day I work, but nothing ever materializes. I fell like Penelope, weaving and unweaving.”
74. “We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.”
75. “Time is nothing.”
76. “I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn’t stand losing. But it’s too late for that.”
77. “Do you worry sometimes that all the really great stuff has already happened?”
78. “I realize that I have forgotten my present Henry in my joy at seeing my once and future Henry, and I’m ashamed. I feel an almost maternal longing to go solace the strange boy who is becoming the man before me.”
79. “But you make me happy. It’s living up to being happy that’s the difficult part.”
80. “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.”
81. “I am conducting conversations with Henry as though he were here with me, as though he could see through my eyes, think with my brain.”
82. “The pain has left but I know that it has not gone far, that it is sulking somewhere in a corner or under the bed and it will jump out when I least expect it.”
83. “You made it impossible for me to find you in the present; you said it would just happen when it was supposed to happen.”
84. “My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about 4,000 books.”
85. “Part of me wants to turn him into hamburger and part of me doesn’t want to beat up somebody who’s taped to a tree.”
86. “We live in a state of holding breath, afraid to exhale for fear of breathing out the baby too soon.”
87. “I love. I have loved. I will love.”
88. “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.”
89. “The best love is the kind that weakens the soul, that makes us reach for more. That plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.”
90. “absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird”
91. “I am past hunger, past vanity, past caring.”
92. “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.”
93. “But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.”
94. “I feel that I an everything to her.”
95. “The cure might be worse than the problem”
96. “And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as though I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches. Obviously she knows me, and I don’t know her. Lord only knows what I have said, done, or promised to this luminous creature.”
97. “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.
98. “Of course.. some people, me included, believe that punk is just the most recent manifestation of this, this spirit, this feeling, you know, that things aren’t right and that in fact things are so wrong that the only thing we can do is to say Fuck It, over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us.”
99. “I am so tired. Even the word sleep is a lure, a seduction.”
100. “Dream are different than real life but important too.”
101. “Henry is glancing around us, worrying that readers, co-workers are noticing us, searching his memory, realizing that some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him.”
102. “I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room”
103. “…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”
104. “When we met I was wrecked, blasted, and damned, and I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too.”
105. “Sometimes I would give anything to open up Henry’s brain and look at his memory like a movie. I remember when I first learned to use a computer; I wanted to push my hands though the screen and get the real thing in there, whatever it was. I like to do things directly, touch the textures, see the colors. ”
106. “We are attempting to buy a house. Shopping for houses is amazing. People who would never invite you into their homes under any other circumstances open their doors wide, allow you to peer into their closets, pass judgment on their wallpaper, ask pointed questions about their gutters.”
107. “Why has he gone where I cannot follow?”
108. “Clare swings a leg over me so she’s sitting exactly on top of my cock. It concentrates my attention wonderfully.”
109. “But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.”
110. “Whatever happens we both know that I live to be at least forty-three. So don’t worry about it.”
