Audrey Niffenegger Quotes

Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.
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
The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.
Audrey Niffenegger
...and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him- Clare
Audrey Niffenegger
I fell asleep. But later that night I woke up. There was moonlight coming through the window, and shadows of tree branches fell onto the bed, waving gently in the breeze.""And then you saw the ghost?"James laughed. "Dear chap, the branches WERE the ghost. There weren't any trees within a hundred yards of that house. They'd all been cut down years before. I saw the ghost of a tree.
Audrey Niffenegger
But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.
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
Sister Carmelita says animals don't have souls""Of course animals have souls, where did she get that idea?""She said the Pope says." "The Pope's an old meanie. Animals have much nicer souls than we do. They never tell lies or blow anybody up." "They eat each other." "Well, they have to eat each other; they can't go to Dairy Queen and get a large vanilla cone with sprinkles, can they? ""They could eat grass.""So could we, but we don't. We eat hamburgers.
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
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
Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.
Audrey Niffenegger
I love you always. Time is nothing.
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
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
I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.
Audrey Niffenegger
Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.
Audrey Niffenegger
But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true.
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
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
The Garden Under Snow "Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write onclare who was never minebut always belonged to herselfSleeping Beautya crystalline blanketthis is her springthis is her sleeping/awakeningshe is waitingeverything is waitingthe improbable shapes of rootsmy babyher facea garden, waiting.
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
Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.
Audrey Niffenegger
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
When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.
Audrey Niffenegger
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
Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.
Audrey Niffenegger
I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.
Audrey Niffenegger
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
Knowing the future is different from being told what I like.
Audrey Niffenegger
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older.
Audrey Niffenegger
It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me.
Audrey Niffenegger
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
Martin said, "It feels as though part of my self has detached and gone to Amsterdam, where it—she—is waiting for me. Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome?" Julia nodded. "There's pain where she ought to be. It's feeding the other pain, the thing that makes me wash and count and all that. So her absence is stopping me from going to find her. Do you see?
Audrey Niffenegger
When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch of wall space. There are coils of wire and rolls of paper tucked into shelves and drawers. The sculptures remind me of kites, or model airplanes. I say this to Clare one evening, standing in the doorway of her studio in my suit and tie, home from work, about to begin making dinner, and she throws one at me; it flies surprisingly well, and soon we are standing at opposite ends of the hall, tossing tiny sculptures at each other, testing their aerodynamics. The next day I come home to find that Clare has created a flock of paper and wire birds, which are hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A week later our bedroom windows are full of abstract blue translucent shapes that the sun throws across the room onto the walls, making a sky for the bird shapes Clare has painted there. It's beautiful. The next evening I'm standing in the doorway of Clare's studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she's trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.
Audrey Niffenegger
Mama said, "Dreams are different to real life but important too.
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
When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word. It became a vision of the afterlife as a library, of heaven as a funky old camper filled with everything you've ever read. What is this heaven? What is it we desire from the hours, weeks, lifetimes we devote to books? What would you sacrifice to sit in that comfy chair with perfect light for an afternoon in eternity, reading the perfect book, forever?
Audrey Niffenegger
. . .Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry H
Audrey Niffenegger
. . .Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry H
Audrey Niffenegger
To world enough and time.
Audrey Niffenegger
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.
Audrey Niffenegger
The apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments, perform research on each other. We discover Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell and it is okay for Henry to listen to the Shaggs as long as the other person isn't around. We figure out that Henry should do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is willing to vacuum so we hire a cleaning service.
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
...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.
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
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
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
I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room
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
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
one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.
Audrey Niffenegger
The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.
Audrey Niffenegger
Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.
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
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
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
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
‎I never wanted to have anything in my life that I couldn't stand losing. But it's too late for that.
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
I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me.
Audrey Niffenegger