Top 180 Audrey Niffenegger Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

52. “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

53. “Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

54. “In the dim light of the computer screen he seemed otherworldly; Julia thought him beautiful, though she knew it was the beauty of damage.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

55. “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

56. “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

57. “This is good, I’m taking care of myself, I’m not being an idiot, I’m remembering to eat dinner.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

58. “You’re the oddest person I’ve ever met, you couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

59. “She’s going to break my heart and I’m going to let her.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

60. “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

61. “When it’s over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

62. “There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

63. “It would be a bad joke if I fell and broke myself now.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

64. “But you make me happy. It’s living up to being happy that’s the difficult part.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

65. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

66. “What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

67. “Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you’re dead?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

68. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

69. “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

70. “Doctors don’t believe anything unless you can prove it to them.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

71. “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

72. “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

73. “Our coffee is so good we drink it ourselves!”

— Audrey Niffenegger

74. “That’s what alcoholics do. It’s in their job description: fall apart and then keep falling apart.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

75. “And Clare, always Clare.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

76. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

77. “He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds – mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh – it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

78. “My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Sometimes a thing is – too much – and it has to be isolated and put away.” Martin shrugged. “So what’s in the boxes is – emotion. In the form of objects.“-Her Fearful Symmetry.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

83. “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

84. “Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

85. “When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, change into a desperate version of myself.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

86. “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

87. “Clare snores, quiet animal snores that feel like bulldozers running through my head. I want my own bed, in my own apartment. 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

88. “When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

89. “I’m suicidal just thinking about it.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

90. “I was thinking; it’s very peaceful, here with you. It’s nice to just lie here and know that the future is sort of taken care of.” “Henry?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

91. “I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

92. “But I don’t want to just believe it, I want it to be true.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

93. “It was silly, wasn’t it? But the singing made it not silly.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

94. “The pain has receded but what’s left is the shell of pain, an empty space where there should be pain but instead there is the expectation of pain.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

95. “I feel that I an everything to her.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

96. “It’s funny how we like labels. If I ever have a bookstore, I’m not going to put any labels on the sections.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

97. “We’re squirrels in human form, she whispered. And so are you.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

98. “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

99. “The heart asks pleasure first; and then excuse from pain.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

100. “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