Audrey Niffenegger Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

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

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 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
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
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 was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

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

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

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
He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn't have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.

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
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
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 go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?

Audrey Niffenegger
But don't you think, I persist, that 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
Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will.

Audrey Niffenegger
Absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

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
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
That's the thing about living vicariously; it's so much faster than actual living. In a few minutes we'll be worrying about names for the children.

Audrey Niffenegger
Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. 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
The engagement ring is an emerald, and the dim light from the window is refracted green and white in it. The rings are silver, and they need cleaning. They need wearing, and I know just the girl to wear them.

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
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
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