Top 100 Lauren Groff Quotes
#1. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]
Lauren Groff
#2. She would do it again if she had to. To save the horror. To save herself. She would do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, if she had to.
Lauren Groff
#3. Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.
Lauren Groff
#4. Kipling called it a very long conversation.
Lauren Groff
#5. Famous people consume us because we are bored.
Lauren Groff
#6. She'd been accepted to the one school she'd applied to, early, for no other reason than that she'd loved the oddball essay questions in the application. How such small things can decide one's fate.
Lauren Groff
#7. I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
Lauren Groff
#8. Already he loved the laugh she held in her,
Lauren Groff
#9. In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
Lauren Groff
#10. He can only bear tragedy if it's abstract.
Lauren Groff
#12. Forgive her if she believed this would be the way it would go. She had been led to this conclusion by forces greater than she. Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to! Like
Lauren Groff
#13. He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered.
Lauren Groff
#14. The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath.
Lauren Groff
#15. Did you?' the producer said. 'He's so clownish on the surface, all joke and dazzle. How in the world could you have seen it?'
'But I did. The moment I met him," she said. "A fucking supernova. Every day since.' She thought, but did not say, almost.
Lauren Groff
#16. Though she appeared confected of sugar and air, there was a bitter black walnut at her core.
Lauren Groff
#17. I love you beyond love.'
'Me too,' she said.
Lauren Groff
#18. there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences,
Lauren Groff
#19. What kind of shark is a shark that doesn't attack? A dolphin. Who needs dolphins? Dolphins are delicious. They make great snacks.
Lauren Groff
#20. The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair.
Lauren Groff
#21. Oh, Lotto, Mathilde thought with loving despair. Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back. Mathilde
Lauren Groff
#22. Itadakimasu, I take this nourishment in gratitude to all beings;
Lauren Groff
#23. His heart ... responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.
Lauren Groff
#24. I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.
Lauren Groff
#25. Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
Lauren Groff
#27. Also the fact that he's a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she's like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he's doing what boys do.
Lauren Groff
#28. Bit believes the treats' chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like.
Lauren Groff
#29. Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
Lauren Groff
#30. She had always hated cats. They seemed so full of rage. She put her napkin on the table and smiled with all her teeth.
Lauren Groff
#31. Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.
Lauren Groff
#32. While I know some women who are stunningly sanguine when they're pregnant, I dissolve into a total mess. What normally appears sturdy turns fragile: the economy, the climate, humanity's baseline social contract.
Lauren Groff
#33. 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.
Lauren Groff
#34. No more risking the hurt that came from contact with others.
Lauren Groff
#35. Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual high-wire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations.
Lauren Groff
#36. Right now, right now, I am strange. It is strange. This life is strange. For now, only for now, I am happy.
Lauren Groff
#37. And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he'd had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.
Lauren Groff
#38. Stubborn heart,' I said. 'Long memory. Bad mix.
Lauren Groff
#39. We have all had stupid youths,' said Mathilde. 'I find them delicious.
Lauren Groff
#40. When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
Lauren Groff
#41. I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.
Lauren Groff
#42. Life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up.
Lauren Groff
#43. She had made so many calculations, but none involved her legs melting from under her with the instant desire to screw.
Lauren Groff
#44. The ground heaved, and then, because the air was bright and the birds were
Lauren Groff
#46. 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.
Lauren Groff
#47. You can't hate me, Mathilde, when I say no. This is my work.
Lauren Groff
#48. A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun's seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction.
Lauren Groff
#49. But please, Mathilde knew lions. The male lolled beautifully, lazy in the sun. The female, less lovely by miles, was the one who brought back the kill.
Lauren Groff
#50. Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.
Lauren Groff
#51. Never. Never for me. I'd die first. Never's a liar.
Lauren Groff
#52. He was enough of a lover of forms to understand the allure of such a strict life, how much internal wildness it could release.
Lauren Groff
#53. Felt like yesterday, all that bodily joy. Begun so young they didn't even know what they were doing and they wouldn't give it up, so when they were old enough, they married. Not the worst thing to build a marriage around, such juice. The first years had been delirious, the latter ones merely happy.
Lauren Groff
#54. A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.
Lauren Groff
#57. He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.
Lauren Groff
#58. 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.
Lauren Groff
#59. This, for eternity. He closed his eyes and wished. Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they'd done. Marriage meant forever.
Lauren Groff
#60. The senator was the kind of man who, having expended all his empathetic capital on marrying someone surprising, wanted to make sure no other people had the ability to make their own choices for themselves. He was anti-immigration, antiwoman, antigay, and that was just for starters. To
Lauren Groff
#61. They could have lived on happiness alone, in their glamourous poverty, in their apartment.
Lauren Groff
#62. But what else was there to do but sing in the face of dismay,
Lauren Groff
#63. My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
Lauren Groff
#64. We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.
Lauren Groff
#65. A sculpture of marriage, marriage come alive. Lancelot
Lauren Groff
#66. Her husband's desire had always been more to chase and capture the gleam of the person inside the body than the body itself.
Lauren Groff
#67. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you're seeing.
Lauren Groff
#68. When your family dismisses you, like Lotto's did, you create your own family
Lauren Groff
#69. She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of black birds. Her husband had moved people, and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them, was not hers, was now theirs.
Lauren Groff
#70. She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.
Lauren Groff
#71. Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It's not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.
Lauren Groff
#74. 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.
Lauren Groff
#75. Whether the weather be cold, whether the weather be hot, we'll be together whatever the weather whether we like it or not
Lauren Groff
#76. Choosing to give the gift of privacy over that of comfort.
Lauren Groff
#77. I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.
Lauren Groff
#78. He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what's important behind. [It
Lauren Groff
#79. Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you'd crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.
Lauren Groff
#80. He'd been dazzled by the luck; she smiled, knowing that luck was not real. The
Lauren Groff
#81. Can we talk about the play? Other than the fact that I gave your personality to a murderer, what did you think?
Lauren Groff
#82. Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren't around.
Lauren Groff
#83. The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.
Lauren Groff
#84. It would never have ended that way. [True. It was not his time.]
Lauren Groff
#85. We're lonely down here," he said. "It's true. But we're not alone.
Lauren Groff
#86. I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.
Lauren Groff
#88. Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.
Lauren Groff
#89. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what's important behind.
Lauren Groff
#90. We will return to them. For now, he's the one we can't look away from. He is the shining one.]
Lauren Groff
#91. The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.
Lauren Groff
#92. In twenty years, they'd have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.
Lauren Groff
#93. Hey. Look at me. You're being ridiculous, and not because you have woman parts.
Lauren Groff
#94. The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece.
Lauren Groff
#95. Boys belong to their mothers. Cord cut decades ago, but they'll always share the warm, dark swim.
Lauren Groff
#96. Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions
how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.
Lauren Groff
#97. Yes, there was one. Solitary, gleaming. A regret. It was that, all her life, she had said no. From the beginning, she had let so few people in.
Lauren Groff
#98. As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
Lauren Groff
#99. Stigmata, she said as tonguelessly as possible, and laughed.
Lauren Groff
#100. WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
Lauren Groff
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