Audrey Niffenegger Quotes

Everything is still out there: the rooftops and chimneys, the graffiti, the office towers and the cyclists; soon there will be sheep and that immense sky the keep out in the countryside ... Once I thought there were two realities, inner and outer, but perhaps that's a bit meagre; I'm not quite the same person I was last night ... ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Alba, it's okay,' Clare says softly. She looks at me. 'Say the poem about lovers on the carpet.'
I blank, and then I remember. I feel self-conscious reciting Rilke in front of all these people, and so I begin: 'Engel!: Es wäre ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen-'
'Say it in English,' Clare interrupts.
'Sorry. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

He thanked her and left the house in the mood of a shipwrecked man who has allowed the rescue ship to pass him by. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I love. I have loved. I will love. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I figure whatever I choose to create, I'll be neglecting somebody - so my art may as well make me happy. - Audrey Niffenegger ~ Jen Campbell

The kissed surprised him because it had been so long since he'd kissed anyone but Elspeth. It surprised Valentina because she had hardly ever kissed anyone that way - to her, kissing had always been more theoretical than physical. Afterwards she stood with her eyes closed, lips parted, face tilted. Robert thought, She's going to break my heart and I'm going to let her. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I think that a lot of people have a longing to move out of the present. The present is very constricting. You can't go back to your past, you can't go ahead to see what's in your future, so you have to put up with whatever is here now. People have a deep longing to think about something else and move into a fictional world and also to feel there are other possibilities than just everyday reality. I don't think time travel is actually possible, but as a metaphor it is interesting. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The engagement ring is an emerald, and the dim light from the window is refracted green and white in it. The rings are silver, and they need cleaning. They need wearing, and I know just the girl to wear them. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Knowing the future is different from being told what I like. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved ~ Audrey Niffenegger

CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

And I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him
- Clare ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

Not because they're dead. Though unattainability is always attractive. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

That's what alcoholics do. It's in their job description: fall apart and then keep falling apart. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I'm curious about things that people aren't supposed to see - so, for example, I liked going to the British Museum, but I would like it better if I could go into all the offices and storage rooms, I want to look in all the drawers and - discover stuff. And I want to know about people. I mean, I know it's probably kind of rude but I want to know why you have all these boxes and what's in them and why all your windows are papered over and how long it's been that way and how do you feel when you wash things and why don't you do something about it? ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other
than just getting older. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

My head is throbbing. I need coffee. Leaving the marbled papers in a state of controlled chaos, I walk through the office and past the page's desk in the Reading Room. I am halted by Isabelle's voice saying, "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," by which she means "Henry, you weasel, where are you slinking off to?" and this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as through I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches. Obviously she knows me, and I don't know her. Lord only knows what I've said, done, or promised to this luminous creature, so I am forced to say in my best librarianese, "Is there something I can help you with?" The girl sort of breathes "Henry!" in this very evocative way that convinces me that at some point in time we have a really amazing thing together. This makes it worse that I don't know anything about her, not even her name. I say "Have we met?" and Isabelle givs me a look that says You asshole. But the girl says, "I'm Claire Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl," and invites me out to dinner. I accept, stunned. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Why do I feel like I'm at the edge of a hole? ~ Audrey Niffenegger

When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain befor you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Time is nothing. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

So in order to cope, I pick locks, shoplift, pick pockets, mug people, panhandle, break and enter, steal cars, lie, fold, spindle, and mutilate. You name it, I've done it ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I am always glad when he come's back ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I want to be haunted...Haunt me...Come and put your arms around me...Or, if you can't do that, just look at me. That's all I need. Where are you? Not here. But I can't feel you gone either...I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid...Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me. I'm afraid. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

You didn't answer my question. I asked you about being in love. You said what it was like when your wife went away."
Martin sat down again. How young she is. When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing. Julia stood with her hands clenched, as though she wanted to pound an answer out of him. "Being in love is ... anxious," he said. "Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is ... you're naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all ... I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her. Now she's gone, and my knowledge is incomplete. So all day I imagine what she is doing, what she says and who she talks to, how she looks. I try to supply the missing hours, and it gets harder as they pile up, all the time she's been gone. I have to imagine. I don't know, really. I don't know any more. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

To world enough and time. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

But as usual there's no answer to this. As usual, that's just how it is. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Yes; the poem goes something like this: 'Bamboo without mind, yet sends thoughts soaring among clouds. Standing on the lone mountain, quiet, dignified, it typifies the will of a gentleman.
Painted and written with light heart, Wu Chen.'
Sunday, May 31, 1992 ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it's a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I raise my head and see a red illuminated EXIT sign and as my eyes adjust I see tigers, cavemen with long spears, cavewomen wearing strategically modest skins, wolfish dogs. My heart is racing and for a liquor-addled moment I think Holy shit, I've gone all the way back to the Stone Age until I realize that EXIT signs tend to congregate in the twentieth century. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery at any time 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.
"Clare? Earth to Clare ... "
"Thank you," I say, too abruptly. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Each of them warmed to the sound of the other's voice. They lay in the dark together, in distant cities, each of them thinking, We were lucky this time. And they pressed their phones closer to their ears, and both of them wondered how much longer this separation could go on. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Now it becomes clear that he's one of those people who is fastidious about his personal appearance but secretly skivenly about everything else ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness, dead people need us to rememer them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I am sorry", until its as meaningless as air. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Very few people meet their soulmates at age six. So you gotta pass the time somehow. And Ingrid was very - patient. Overly patient. Willing to put up with odd behavior, in the hope that someday I would shape up and marry her martyred ass. And when somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense? ~ Audrey Niffenegger

One may do many things in a long life. I also played a great deal of tennis and brought up three children. There's time for all sorts of adventures. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

He saw things he had no words for. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

How could you lose me? I'm not going anywhere."
"I worry that you will get tired of putting up with my undependableness and you will leave me."
Clare puts her sketchbook aside. I sit up. "I won't ever leave you," she says. "Even though you're always leaving me."
"But I never want to leave you. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Time is nothing - Henry's Letter to Claire ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I'm going to fall apart...I cant--I don't know what to feel. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The Garden Under Snow
Now the garden is under snow
a blank page our footprints write on
clare who was never mine
but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty
a crystalline blanket
this is her spring
this is her sleeping/awakening
she is waiting
everything is waiting
the improbable shapes of roots
my baby
her face
a garden, waiting. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The house envelops us, watches us, contemplates us as we make love in it for the first time, the first time of many times, and afterward, as we lie spent on the bare floor surrounded by boxes, I feel that we have found our home. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Jessica put out her hand and braced herself against the door jamb. She experienced one of those rare moments when understanding of the world alters and a previously impossible thing is admitted, if not understood. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

I still feel like a castaway, th elast of a once numerous species. It was as though Robinson Crusoe discovered the telltale footprint on the beach and then realized that it was his own. Myself, small as a leaf, thin as water, begins to cry. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love ... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Elspeth stood in the sun, letting it pour through her, watching the Kitten sleep. I want you. Elspeth felt depressed. She had never thought of herself as someone who would kill a beautiful white kitten while it napped. But apparently she was that sort of person. Don't you worry, Kitten. I'll put you right back. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

How do we find the thing we are meant to do? How do we become ourselves? These are enormous questions for every young artists, but they can only be answered in retrospect. We see the path only after we've been on it for quite a long time. We read a book and we wonder how it was made. We wonder about the person who made it. We wonder if we could make something like that ourselves. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Sister Carmelita says animals don't have souls"
"Of course animals have souls, where did she get that idea?"
"She said the Pope says."
"The Pope's an old meanie. Animals have much nicer souls than we do. They never tell lies or blow anybody up."
"They eat each other."
"Well, they have to eat each other; they can't go to Dairy Queen and get a large vanilla cone with sprinkles, can they? "
"They could eat grass."
"So could we, but we don't. We eat hamburgers. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whoosing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Sleep erases all differences: then and now; dead and living. I am past hunger, past vanity, past caring. This morning I caught sight of my face in the bathroom mirror. I am paperskinned, gauned, yellow, ring-eyed, hait matted. I look dead. I want nothing. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

He looks sad. Or maybe that's just how he looks when he isn't doing something else with his face. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

he said it quietly but with such intensity that Valentina fell in love with him, though she had no name for the feeling and nothing to compare it to. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Henry: How does it feel? How does it feel?

Sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant. Then, with a start, you realize that the book you were holding, the red plaid cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite black jeans and the maroon socks with an almost-hole in one heel, the living room, the about-to-whistle tea kettle in the kitchen: all of these have vanished. You are standing, naked as a jaybird, up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route. You wait a minute to see if maybe you will just snap right back to your book, your apartment, et cetera. After about five minutes of swearing and shivering and hoping to hell you can just disappear, you start walking in any direction, which will eventually yield a farmhouse, where you have the option of stealing or explaining. Stealing will sometimes land you in jail, but explaining is more tedious and time consuming and involves lying anyway, and also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail, so what the hell. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Why is love intensified by absence? ~ Audrey Niffenegger

A bad thing about dying is that I've started to feel as though I'm being erased. Another bad thing is that I won't get to find out what happens next. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Dream are different than real life but important too. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

It wasn't quite raining, but it wasn't exactly not raining either. She heard the driver squelching along the path behind her. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea and women wait for them, standing on the edge of the water, standing in the horizon for the tiny ship. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you're dead? ~ Audrey Niffenegger

What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Ahem," she said. "What are you doing?" Jessica had a voice that rose and fell like a swooping kite. The children instantly stopped what they were doing and looked self-conscious, like cats that have fallen off something ungracefully and now sit licking themselves, pretending nothing has happened. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Everything hurt but she did not mind. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I reach up and pull my hair back from my face, show him the scar from the accident. Unconsciously, he mimics my gesture, touches the same scar on his own forehead.
"It's just like mine," says my self, amazed. "How did you get it?" "The same as you. It is the same. We are the same."
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. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I loved you, I made you, and I made this for you - long after I am gone, and Henry is gone, and even Alba is gone. It will say, we made you, and here you are, here and now. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The hell with virtue. I've figured out the mechanics of her dress. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I am so tired. Even the word sleep is a lure, a seduction. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

After an hour or so has passed I too am gone and there is only a blanket and a book, coffee cups, and clothing, to show that we were there at all. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

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