Top 180 Audrey Niffenegger Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

108. “I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn’t like it, but it’s true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving children of India.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

113. “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

114. “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 againts.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

116. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

131. “I hear a muffled sniffling noise and glancing at Claire I am astonished to see that tears are streaming across her face toward her ears. I sit up and lean over her... I smooth her hair, and pull her into a sitting position, wrap my arms around her.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

132. “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?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

133. “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

134. “He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

135. “As I penetrate Clare she looks at me and I think I don’t exist and a second later she turns her head and sees me. She cries out, not loudly, and looks back at me, above her, in her. Then she remembers, accepts it, this is pretty strange but it’s okay, and in this moment I love her more than life.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

136. “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

137. “I guess no matter what your family is like, you’re not surprised.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

138. “Roy is my favorite security guy. He’s a huge African-American gentleman who always has a beautiful smile on his face. He’s the King of the Main Desk, and I’m always glad to arrive at work and bask in his magnificent good cheer.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

139. “I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, 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.” -The Night Bookmobile.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

140. “Not because they’re dead. Though unattainability is always attractive.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

141. “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. And I have been trying to do it without you noticing, because I haven’t figured out that all pretense is useless between us.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

142. “There’s something about the way she says it that makes me feel strange... It dawns on me that I am jealous. Jesus. I can’t believe I’m feeling jealous of a multimillionaire rock star geezer old enough to be Clare’s dad.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

143. “Turning each page is like making a bed, an enormous expanse of paper slowly rises up and over.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

144. “How delicately language skirts the issue. How meaningless it is.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

145. “Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

146. “I love him. He’s my life. I’ve been waiting for him, my whole life, and now, he’s here.” I don’t know how to explain. “With Henry, I can see everything laid out, like a map, past and future, everything at once, like an angel... ” I shake my head. I can’t put it into words. “I can reach into him and touch time... he loves me. We’re married because... we’re part of each other... ” I falter. “It’s happened already. All at once.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

147. “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 before you can say ‘Liquid-Plumr’;.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

148. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

149. “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

150. “My body wanted a baby. I felt empty and I wanted to be full. I wanted someone to love and who would stay: stay and be there, always. And I wanted Henry to be this child, so that when he was gone, he wouldn’t be entirely gone, there would be a bit of him with me... insurance, in case of fire, flood, act of God.”

— Audrey Niffenegger