Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

Joyce Carol Oates
About This Quote

An excerpt from the novel "The Time Traveler's Wife," by Audrey Niffenegger. A young woman named Esther, a member of a large family, has been to her grandparents' house in their small town in the midwest. It was a very strong memory for her. After her grandmother's death, she moves to New York City, where she meets a man who is also from the small town of home. When he comes back to visit, she falls in love with him and visits often.

She feels that she loves him more than her parents did, because he is the person that she fell in love with when she was growing up. When she visits him at his home, she is able to feel a sense of peace and comfort that she didn't feel when she visited her grandparents.

Source: High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 19662006

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  1. The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
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  4. If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
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