Top 180 Audrey Niffenegger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

2. “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?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

3. “It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

4. “Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home. Clare sighs, turns her head, and is quiet. Hi, honey. I’m home. I’m home.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

5. “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

6. “Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

7. “What we need,? Henry says, ’is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let’s call her Tabula Rasa.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

10. “Everything seems simple until you think about it.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

11. “Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

12. “Why is love intensified by absence?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

13. “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?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

14. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

15. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

16. “That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living. In a few minutes we’ll be worrying about names for the children.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

17. “The cure might be worse than the problem.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

18. “My family isn’t posh; they’re musicians.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

19. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

20. “When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

21. “But sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.′ ‘That’s called determinism.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

22. “I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

23. “It’s hard to be the one who stays.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

24. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

27. “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

28. “I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. – Henry deTamble.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

29. “Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

30. “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

31. “There’s always world enough, and time.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

32. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

33. “Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

34. “Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

35. “Do you ever miss him? Every day. Every minute. Every minute, she says. Yes, it’s that way, isn’t it?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

36. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

37. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

38. “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

39. “I am past hunger, past vanity, past caring.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

40. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

41. “He is coming, and I am here.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

42. “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

43. “I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

44. “But as usual there’s no answer to this. As usual, that’s just how it is.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

45. “I don’t want to boss anyone and I don’t want to be bossed.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

46. “I love you, always. Time is nothing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

47. “I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

48. “Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

49. “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

50. “CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.”

— Audrey Niffenegger