Audrey Niffenegger famous quotes

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

#Life #Thinking #Inspire

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

#Tired #Sleep #Winter

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

#Love #Pregnancy #Writing

Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Knowing #Not Knowing #Sometimes

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

#Alive

The pain has left but I know that it has not gone far, that it is sulking somewhere in a corner or under the bed and it will jump out when I least expect it.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Pain #Sulking #Bed

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.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Dark #Bird #Dimensions

Why is love intensified by absence?
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Life #Absence

It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Love #Time #Left Behind

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

#Mean #Facts #Want

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

#Love #Depression #Running

…she smiles in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Way #Sun #Brilliant

Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Facts #Chaos

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

#Christian #Block #Past

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

#Sleep #Opiates #Lovers

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

#Sorry #Mean #Littles

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Moving #Resistance #Elements

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

#Travel #World #Panic

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

#Wanted Someone #Wanted

I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Beautiful #Morning #Book

I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Dark #Hell #Bent

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

#Mom #Mother #Children

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

#Thinking #Past #Interesting

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

#Missing #Way #Minutes

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

#Stupid #Winning #Dedication

I guess no matter what your family is like, you're not surprised.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Matter #Like You

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

#Simple #Thinking

That's what alcoholics do. It's in their job description: fall apart and then keep falling apart.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Jobs #Fall #Description

The cure might be worse than the problem
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Might #Problem #Cures

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

#Pain #Self #Waiting

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

#Hallucinations #Wilderness #Melancholy

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. As I run I displace air, and things come and go around me, and the path moves like a filmstrip beneath my feet.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Running #Moving #Feet

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

#Memories #Book #Hours

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. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Art #War #Army

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

#Dark #Bird #Nerves

My family isn't posh; they're musicians.
-- Audrey Niffenegger

#Musician #My Family #Posh