Top 100 Audrey Niffenegger Quotes
#1. I figure whatever I choose to create, I'll be neglecting somebody - so my art may as well make me happy. - Audrey Niffenegger
Jen Campbell
#2. 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
#3. 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
#5. 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
#6. The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances.
Audrey Niffenegger
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.
Audrey Niffenegger
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice.
Audrey Niffenegger
#14. 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
#15. I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble
Audrey Niffenegger
#16. 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
#17. Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.
Audrey Niffenegger
#20. 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
#22. I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved
Audrey Niffenegger
#23. CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble.
Audrey Niffenegger
#24. When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.
Audrey Niffenegger
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.
Audrey Niffenegger
#30. 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
#31. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.
Audrey Niffenegger
#37. It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays behind.
Audrey Niffenegger
#38. Sometimes I'm happy when he's gone, but I'm always happy when he returns. -Clare
Audrey Niffenegger
#39. 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
#40. 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
#42. [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
#45. I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.
Audrey Niffenegger
#46. 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
#48. When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.
Audrey Niffenegger
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. But as usual there's no answer to this. As usual, that's just how it is.
Audrey Niffenegger
#53. Do you worry sometimes that all the really great stuff has already happened?
Audrey Niffenegger
#54. Clare seems so pleased with the idea of me as a pirate that she forgets that I am Stranger Danger.
Audrey Niffenegger
#55. 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
#56. What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing.
Audrey Niffenegger
#58. If you are far away from your lover and family, if you have lost someone, if you feel a bit displaced in your own life: these stories are for you.
Audrey Niffenegger
#60. We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.
Audrey Niffenegger
#61. 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
#64. You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.
Audrey Niffenegger
#66. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.
Audrey Niffenegger
#67. What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa.
Audrey Niffenegger
#70. 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
#71. That's the thing about living vicariously; it's so much faster than actual living.
Audrey Niffenegger
#72. 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
#74. Love you ... " Henry-" Always ... " Oh God oh God-" World enough ... " No!" And time ... " Henry!
Audrey Niffenegger
#76. I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I'm sorry" until it is as meaningless air.
Audrey Niffenegger
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. It's hard being left behind. ( ... ) It's hard to be the one who stays.
Audrey Niffenegger
#80. I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.
Audrey Niffenegger
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me.
Audrey Niffenegger
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. I am so accustomed to living on a metaphysical trapeze that I forget that other people tend to enjoy more solid ground
Audrey Niffenegger
#88. 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
#89. The hell with virtue. I've figured out the mechanics of her dress.
Audrey Niffenegger
#90. 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
#91. Hy should free will be limited to right and wrong? I mean, you just decided, of your own free will, to take off your shoes. It doesn't matter, nobody cares if you wear shoes or not, and it's not sinful, or virtuous, and it doesn't affect the future, but you've exercised your free will.
Audrey Niffenegger
#92. 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
#93. Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I am always glad when he come's back
Audrey Niffenegger
#94. 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
#95. Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.
Audrey Niffenegger
#96. I think play must have been invented so we wouldn't go mad thinking about certain things.
Audrey Niffenegger
#97. Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller ... Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.
Audrey Niffenegger
#98. 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.
Audrey Niffenegger
#99. [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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
