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

— Audrey Niffenegger

Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Else the flavor, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude.

— Audrey Niffenegger

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read-books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

— 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

He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - my REI kWh, my REI kWh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.

— Audrey Niffenegger

I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.

— 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

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

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. Furthermore, I work until I'm tired. Furthermore, 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 absence?

— Audrey Niffenegger

I love you always. Time is nothing.

— Audrey Niffenegger