Top 180 Audrey Niffenegger Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

153. “He looks sad. Or maybe that’s just how he looks when he isn’t doing something else with his face.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

156. “I love. I have loved. I will love.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

157. “Why has he gone where I cannot follow?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

158. “I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

159. “We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

160. “Sometimes I’m happy when he’s gone, but I’m always happy when he returns. -Clare.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

161. “That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

162. “Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

163. “My reflection in the mirror shows me pink and puffy. I thought pregnant women were to supposed to glow. I am not glowing.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

164. “I’m bored with knitting. I’ve taken up arson.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

165. “The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

166. “He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

167. “Sometimes I am glad when Henry’s gone, but I am always glad when he come’s back.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

168. “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

169. “When somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense?”

— Audrey Niffenegger

170. “I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I’m corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody’s got to do it.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “We live in a state of holding breath, afraid to exhale for fear of breathing out the baby too soon.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

180. “Henry gaat op de schommel naast me zitten, met zijn gezicht de andere kant op, en we schommelen steeds hoger en hoger, we passeren elkaar, soms gaan we gelijk op en soms gaan we zo snel langs elkaar dat het net lijkt alsof we zullen botsen, en we lachen, en lachen, en niets kan ooit verdrietig zijn, niets kan ooit worden verloren, of dood zijn, of ver weg; nu zijn we hier, en niets kan onze volmaaktheid verstoren of dit volmaakte moment van zijn vreugde beroven.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

181. “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

182. “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.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

183. “We are doing what we often do when we have a little privacy, when it’s cold out when both of us are past puberty and haven’t quite gotten around to actual girls yet. I think most people would do this, if they had the sort of opportunities I have. I mean i’m not gay or anything.”

— Audrey Niffenegger