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

— Audrey Niffenegger

. . . Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry H

— Audrey Niffenegger

That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense anymore. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.

— Audrey Niffenegger

The apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments, perform research on each other. We discover Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell, and it is okay for Henry to listen to the Shaggy as long as the other person isn't around. Furthermore, we figure out that Henry should do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is willing to vacuum so we hire a cleaning service.

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

The Garden Under Snow "Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write unclear who was never mine but always belonged to herself Sleeping Beauty crystalline blanket this is her spring this is her sleeping/awakening she is waiting everything is waiting the improbable shapes of roots my baby her face garden, waiting.

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. Furthermore, I have loved. Furthermore, I will love.

— 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