Audrey Niffenegger Quotes

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

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

When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.

~ 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

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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 love you always. Time is nothing.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.

~ 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

[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

Sister Carmelita says animals don't have soulsOf 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

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

But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

~ 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

...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

The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small that my ideas have become small.

~ 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

Time, let me vanish. Then what we separate by our very presence can come together.

~ Audrey Niffenegger