Audrey Niffenegger Quotes & Sayings

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. — Audrey Niffenegger

You're the oddest person I've ever met, you couldn't get rid of me if you tried. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

Everything seems simple until you think about it. — Audrey Niffenegger

Do you worry sometimes that all the really great stuff has already happened? — Audrey Niffenegger

I reach up and pull my hair back from my face, show him the scar from the accident. Unconsciously, he mimics my gesture, touches the same scar on his own forehead.
"It's just like mine," says my self, amazed. "How did you get it?" "The same as you. It is the same. We are the same."
A translucent moment. I didn't understand, and then I did, just like that. I watch it happen. I want to be both of us at once, feel again the feeling of losing the edges of my self, of seeing the admixture of future and present for the first time. But I'm too accustomed, too comfortable with it, and so I am left on the outside, remembering the wonder of being nine and suddenly seeing, knowing, that my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only me. The loneliness of it. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

Why is love intensified by absence? — Audrey Niffenegger

She looks up at me, still rocking. "Henry ... why did me decide to do this again?"
"Supposedly when it's over they hand you a baby and let you keep it."
"Oh yeah."
Wednesday, September 5, 2001 — Audrey Niffenegger

But as usual there's no answer to this. As usual, that's just how it is. — Audrey Niffenegger

I am past hunger, past vanity, past caring. — Audrey Niffenegger

Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea and women wait for them, standing on the edge of the water, standing in the horizon for the tiny ship. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

It answers to the name of Henry, but you can call it Library Boy. — Audrey Niffenegger

Why do I feel like I'm at the edge of a hole? — Audrey Niffenegger

I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I'm gone. It's like marrying a policeman. — Audrey Niffenegger

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble — Audrey Niffenegger

I think play must have been invented so we wouldn't go mad thinking about certain things. — Audrey Niffenegger

If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

I'm curious about things that people aren't supposed to see - so, for example, I liked going to the British Museum, but I would like it better if I could go into all the offices and storage rooms, I want to look in all the drawers and - discover stuff. And I want to know about people. I mean, I know it's probably kind of rude but I want to know why you have all these boxes and what's in them and why all your windows are papered over and how long it's been that way and how do you feel when you wash things and why don't you do something about it? — Audrey Niffenegger

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

Here all of nature was captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that seemed as timeless as if ordered by God, perhaps a God who had mislaid the original paperwork on the Creation and had requested the Field Museum staff to help him out and keep track of it all. — Audrey Niffenegger

I can appreciate that," says Henry. He's adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth ...
Henry, they're not going to be able to get any of that up here." He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. "You do have a record player, right?"
My parents have one," Bobby says. Henry winces.
What do you really like?" I ask Jodie. I feel as though she's fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting.
Prince," she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing "1999" as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we're doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it's a dance party. — Audrey Niffenegger

That's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws — Audrey Niffenegger

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. 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 lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow? — Audrey Niffenegger

I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

Yes; the poem goes something like this: 'Bamboo without mind, yet sends thoughts soaring among clouds. Standing on the lone mountain, quiet, dignified, it typifies the will of a gentleman.
Painted and written with light heart, Wu Chen.'
Sunday, May 31, 1992 — Audrey Niffenegger

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

I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness, dead people need us to rememer them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I am sorry", until its as meaningless as air. — Audrey Niffenegger

I'm at a loss because I am in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all. (Time Traveler's Wife) — Audrey Niffenegger

I do get tired of humans — Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

It's hard to be the one who stays. — Audrey Niffenegger

Being in love is ... anxious," he said. "Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is ... you're naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all ... I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her — Audrey Niffenegger

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

How delicately language skirts the issue. How meaningless it is. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. — Audrey Niffenegger

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. 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. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you. — Audrey Niffenegger

What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

One may do many things in a long life. I also played a great deal of tennis and brought up three children. There's time for all sorts of adventures. — Audrey Niffenegger

I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits.
(from the review of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners in The Guardian) — Audrey Niffenegger

Each of them warmed to the sound of the other's voice. They lay in the dark together, in distant cities, each of them thinking, We were lucky this time. And they pressed their phones closer to their ears, and both of them wondered how much longer this separation could go on. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

Knowing the future is different from being told what I like. — Audrey Niffenegger

Of course.. some people, me included, believe that punk is just the most recent manifestation of this, this spirit, this feeling, you know, that things aren't right and that in fact things are so wrong that the only thing we can do is to say Fuck It, over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us. — Audrey Niffenegger

I am afraid of the future; it seems to be a big box waiting for me. — Audrey Niffenegger

The best love is the kind that weakens the soul, that makes us reach for more. That plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. — Audrey Niffenegger

Time is nothing. — Audrey Niffenegger

Now it becomes clear that he's one of those people who is fastidious about his personal appearance but secretly skivenly about everything else — Audrey Niffenegger

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 befor you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses. — Audrey Niffenegger

It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

he said it quietly but with such intensity that Valentina fell in love with him, though she had no name for the feeling and nothing to compare it to. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. 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. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway. — Audrey Niffenegger

Do you ever miss him?
Every day. Every minute.
Every minute, she says.
Yes, it's that way, isn't it? — Audrey Niffenegger

And Clare, always Clare. Clare in the morning all sleepy and crumple-faced. Clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat, pulling up the mold and shaking it so, and so, to meld the fibers. Clare reading with her hair hanging over the back of the chair, massaging balm into her cracked red hands before bed. Clare's low voice is in my ear often.
I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow. — Audrey Niffenegger

What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing. — Audrey Niffenegger

I don't want to boss anyone and I don't want to be bossed. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

It's living up to being happy that's the most difficult part. — Audrey Niffenegger

She talked back, but he didn't understand her raven language of harsh caws and soft croaks. — Audrey Niffenegger

Dead is the most alone you can be. — Audrey Niffenegger

Nor Time, nor Place, nor Chance, nor Death can bow/my least desires unto the least remove — Audrey Niffenegger

Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I am always glad when he come's back — Audrey Niffenegger

You didn't answer my question. I asked you about being in love. You said what it was like when your wife went away."
Martin sat down again. How young she is. When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing. Julia stood with her hands clenched, as though she wanted to pound an answer out of him. "Being in love is ... anxious," he said. "Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is ... you're naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all ... I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her. Now she's gone, and my knowledge is incomplete. So all day I imagine what she is doing, what she says and who she talks to, how she looks. I try to supply the missing hours, and it gets harder as they pile up, all the time she's been gone. I have to imagine. I don't know, really. I don't know any more. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

He looks sad. Or maybe that's just how he looks when he isn't doing something else with his face. — Audrey Niffenegger

Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller ... Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart. — Audrey Niffenegger

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me. — Audrey Niffenegger

Outside it's a perfect spring night. We stand on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building, and Henry takes my hand, and I look at him, and I raise our joined hands and Henry twirls me around and soon we're dancing down Belle Plaine Avenue, no music but the sound of cars whoosing by and our own laughter, and the smell of cherry blossoms that fall like snow on the sidewalk as we dance underneath the tress. — Audrey Niffenegger

It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me. — Audrey Niffenegger

I feel that I an everything to her. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

Time means nothing."
~The Time Traveller's Wife — Audrey Niffenegger

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

No." Valentina closed her eyes. Of course not. "It'll be great, Mouse. We'll have our own apartment, we won't have to work, — Audrey Niffenegger

Oh. A bigger studio. It dawns on me, stupid me, that Henry could win the lottery at any time at all; that he has never bothered to do so because it's not normal; that he has decided to set aside his fanatical dedication to living like a normal person so I can have a studio big enough to roller-skate across; that I am being an ingrate.
"Clare? Earth to Clare ... "
"Thank you," I say, too abruptly. — Audrey Niffenegger

It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: It's just that I thought maybe you were married to me. — Audrey Niffenegger

The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth. — Audrey Niffenegger

I love. I have loved. I will love. — Audrey Niffenegger

He didn't take care of you; you had to take care of yourself. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

[S]urrealism is my favorite fun thing. My feeling has always been why make something that merely replicates reality when you can have reality. My own interest lies in things that are impossible in some way. — Audrey Niffenegger

To world enough and time. — Audrey Niffenegger

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

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson — Audrey Niffenegger