Quotes by Audrey Niffenegger

Youre 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Im living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know theres 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.

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.

But I dont want to just believe it, I want it to be true.

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.

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.

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.

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales its 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.

I love you always. Time is nothing.

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

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.

[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.

Sister Carmelita says animals dont have soulsOf course animals have souls, where did she get that idea?She said the Pope says. The Popes 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 cant go to Dairy Queen and get a large vanilla cone with sprinkles, can they? They could eat grass.So could we, but we dont. We eat hamburgers.

Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment? her husband, Jack, asked her. Im bored with knitting. Ive taken up arson

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