Lauren Groff Quotes

Each, when invited to talk, was secretly relieved that someone saw them as important as they were.

Struggle forms character. No struggle, no character.

Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It's not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.

His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps. He

Happiness feeds but doesn't nourish.

...no genius, I am a girl who knows too much to know anything at all...

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

They can wound, stories, they can blister.

[Complex, our Mathilde; she can bear contradictions.]

Pig to man in a single hour," he said. "You're a reverse Circe.

A sculpture of marriage, marriage come alive. Lancelot

Home, she thought, looking at him.

Already he loved the laugh she held in her,

She said nothing, eloquently.

The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.

He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

Are you drinking because you're sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?

In his throat, his own body struck to water. Hers is

The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.

Famous people consume us because we are bored.

Though she appeared confected of sugar and air, there was a bitter black walnut at her core.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom.

What kind of shark is a shark that doesn't attack? A dolphin. Who needs dolphins? Dolphins are delicious. They make great snacks.

She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.

It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back.

Hers was a quiet, subtle warfare, but she had always been a warrior.

My Templeton is to Cooperstown as a shadow is to the tree that spawned it; an outline that takes texture from the ground it falls on.

A feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.

You can't hate me, Mathilde, when I say no. This is my work.

The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt.

The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math.

Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow.

Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.]

He was frightened by this glimpse of what was in her and wouldn't watch it unfurl.

WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear.

You are as dry as vermouth.

Privilege is what lets you take risks.

It moved him to know that for her he was everything. He wouldn't ask for more than she'd willingly give.

I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.

She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.

Still a bit of an athlete, he was pleased to see, even after his summer encased in plaster. Someone brought

She was so agreeably flexible when it came to Lotto that she could have been a contortionist.

The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath.

The ground heaved, and then, because the air was bright and the birds were

Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.

[Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.]

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

He'd been dazzled by the luck; she smiled, knowing that luck was not real. The

Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.

freezing force of the wind. When the blades

She had a self she didn't devote to him.

I'm always hungry for people.

Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic.

Never. Never for me. I'd die first. Never's a liar.

The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece.

I love you beyond love.'
'Me too,' she said.

[The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

Whatever happened to all of those friends of ours Lotto wondered. The ones who had seemed so essential had faded away.

Bit believes the treats' chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like.

What was this mania for universal adoration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone.

This didn't sound strange to her in the meadow full of winter light. It wouldn't ring strange for some months, because here the horror was,

It was mathematical, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.

How long would this sunset take? Time was not behaving the way he had come to expect.

Choosing to give the gift of privacy over that of comfort.

THERE IS LITTLE that a puppy won't fix, even if the fix is for a short time.

...he knows stories don't need to be factual to be vital.

He had become, after all, her home.

They could have lived on happiness alone, in their glamourous poverty, in their apartment.

I live monastically, Mathilde said, meaning, of course, more.

she lived in the deepest room in his heart

I love you beyond love

Marriage meant forever.

He'll flirt until you're a blob of goo and make you fall in love, then look all befuddled when you come on to him.

I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.

And the great Now What stretching without end.

The gods love to fuck with us.

One can't be goof if one can't see the sun. And what does it mean to be human if you can't end your life better than how it began.

Stigmata, she said as tonguelessly as possible, and laughed.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they'll always share the warm, dark swim.

I loved books like people; I liked real people less.

Kipling called it a very long conversation.

So you win. No matter what, you win. It all works out for you in the end. Always. Someone or something's looking out for you. It's maddening.

Beauty puts a fine point on grief, shoots bull's-eye into the heart.

She'd always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they. Horrible

Why has nobody ever told him that the man in the moon is shouting in alarm? He

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

Itadakimasu, I take this nourishment in gratitude to all beings;

But all along she had held within her a second story underneath the first, waging a terrible and silent battle with her certainty.

Because when you've had a good enough Teacher, you're all your own Leaders.

This fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants.

A FASCINATING PBS SPECIAL on black holes: the suck and draw so strong it can gulp down light.

In they'd come, integers; out they came, squared.