Top 180 Audrey Niffenegger Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

109. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

111. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

113. “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

114. “Every day I work, but nothing ever materializes. I fell like Penelope, weaving and unweaving.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

115. “Here’s a good one: Loololuluah. It’s Arabic for pearl.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

116. “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

117. “We dance. The music runs through me, waves of sound that grab me by the spine, that move my feet my hips my shoulders without consulting my brain.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Clare swings a leg over me so she’s sitting exactly on top of my cock. It concentrates my attention wonderfully.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

121. “I want. That’s all. I am wanting.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

122. “I am so tired. Even the word sleep is a lure, a seduction.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

123. “Huge black clouds are moving up from behind the trees, they come up so suddenly that I laugh, they are like puppets, and everything is swirling toward me and there is a long low peal of thunder.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

124. “As always, I had the whole backseat to myself, so I lay down and watched the tall buildings along Lake Shore Drive flicking past the window.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

125. “That’s our Darwinian advantage,” he says. “We escape.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

126. “Knowing the future is different from being told what I like.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

127. “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

128. “I place my finger on her forehead and say, “vanish”, but it is she who will stay; I am the one who is vanishing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

129. “What’s the date?” “September 8, 1998. Where you from?” “Next July.” We sit down at the table. Kimy is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. “What’s going on, next July?” “It’s been a very cool summer, your garden’s looking good. All the tech stocks are up. You should buy some Apple stock in January.” She makes a note on a piece of brown paper bag. “Okay. And you? How are you doing? How’s Clare? You guys got a baby yet?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

130. “We come to a house and walk down the small walkway to its backyard. In the yard there are two screens and a slide projector. People are seated in lawn chairs, watching slides of trees.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

131. “I’m going to fall apart... I cant – I don’t know what to feel.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

132. “That’s Henry. When he makes you moan and cry, don’t say nobody never told you.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

133. “The husband and wife become intensely aware of the present moment. In the present they are free; free to make decisions, free to experiment. They learn to savor their lives because everything is uncertain, and at the same time some things are already too certain. They live and love in the present tense.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

134. “For me? Oh, God. My idea of the perfect life would be if we just stayed in bed all the time. We could make love more or less continuously, and only get up to bring supplies, you know, fresh water and fruit to scurvy, and make occasional trips to the bathroom to shave before diving back to bed. And once in a while we could change the sheets. And go to the movies to prevent bedsores. And running. I would still have to run every morning.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

135. “Tchotchka. Amorta. Heart of my heart. Speak to me.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

136. “The space that I can call mine, that isn’t full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

137. “It’s terrific, Clare,” Henry says, and we stare at each other and I think, “Don’t leave me.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

138. “In the past, we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

139. “It’s not good to know things ahead. It screws up your life.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

140. “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

141. “The music crashes in to a wall and stops.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

142. “Now every absence is a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will hear about when my adventurer materializes at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking. Now I am afraid when he is gone.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

143. “I try to remember being twenty. It’s just a blur of women, breasts, legs, skin, hair. All their stories have jumbled together, and their faces no longer attach themselves to names.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

144. “Everything hurt but she did not mind.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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