Audrey Niffenegger: I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the li...

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.

Audrey Niffenegger

surprise artist

I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn't like it, but it's true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving children of India.

Audrey Niffenegger

balance dancing children

My apartment is basically a couch, an armchair, and about four thousand books.

Audrey Niffenegger

couches four book

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going. - Henry deTamble

Audrey Niffenegger

i-hate hate

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

Audrey Niffenegger

wilderness hallucinations melancholy

I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I ever loved

Audrey Niffenegger

book looks firsts

Maybe I'm dreaming you. Maybe you're dreaming me; maybe we only exist in each other's dreams and every morning when we wake up we forget all about each other.

Audrey Niffenegger

wake-up dream morning

I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I'm gone. It's like marrying a policeman.

Audrey Niffenegger

dangerous-situations broken worry

The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth.

Audrey Niffenegger

drawing wings ideas

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

goblin gone children

I love. I have loved. I will love.

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

butterfly mom blue

...she could express her soul with that voice, whenver I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology...she could really hear, she understood structure and she could analyze exactly what it was about a piece of music that had to be rendered just so...she was a very emotional person, Annette. She brought that out in other people. After she died I don't think I ever really felt anything again.

Audrey Niffenegger

emotional voice thinking

We are walking down the street holding hands. There is a playground at the end of the block, and I run to the swings and I climb on and Henry takes the one next to me facing the opposite direction. And we swing higher and higher passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast that it seems we are going to collide. And 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

block running past

Sometimes I'm happy when he's gone, but I'm always happy when he returns. -Clare

Audrey Niffenegger

return gone sometimes

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

train-of-thought knitting home

Love you..." Henry-" Always..." Oh God oh God-" World enough..." No!" And time..." Henry!

Audrey Niffenegger

enough love-you world

Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it’s a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.

Audrey Niffenegger

ironing-board pain white

It was silly, wasn't it? But the singing made it not silly.

Audrey Niffenegger

singing made silly

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

air running moving

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