Lauren Groff Quotes & Sayings

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

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

It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection. — Lauren Groff

I live monastically, Mathilde said, meaning, of course, more. — Lauren Groff

From the sun's seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. — Lauren Groff

There was the stink of burning martyr in the air. — Lauren Groff

She was crushed with gratitude. — Lauren Groff

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

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

In the soft, silty mouths of girls, grape gum and hot tongue, he concentrated and was able to dissolve the horror that had settled on him. — Lauren Groff

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

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

They can wound, stories, they can blister. — Lauren Groff

I like a bit of spunk in a lady — Lauren Groff

You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though. — Lauren Groff

Then he tells his son, "This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again." He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. "Surfacing," he says. — Lauren Groff

She would always feel this wild girl was the truest of any of the people she had already been: adored daughter, bourgeois priss, rebel, runaway, dope-fiend San Francisco hippie; or all the people she would later be: mother, nurse, religious fanatic, prematurely old woman. Vivienne was a human onion, and when I came home at twenty eight years old on the day the monster died, I was afraid that the Baptist freak she had peeled down to was her true, acrid, tear-inducing core. — Lauren Groff

I loved books like people; I liked real people less. — Lauren Groff

The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one's own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it's the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world. — Lauren Groff

Mathilde let him eat two doughnuts, and his eyes filled with tears because they were the most amazing doughnuts in the history of glazed doughnuts, food of the gods. He was full of joy. — Lauren Groff

Your words have more weight than most people's. You swing them wildly and you can hurt a lot of people, — Lauren Groff

This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right. — Lauren Groff

Mathilde was there in the dawn, this perfect girl as if made to his specifications. [A different life, had Lotto listened to the terror: no glory, no plays; peace, ease, and money. No glamour; children. Which life was better? Not for us to say.] — Lauren Groff

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply. — Lauren Groff

Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.] — Lauren Groff

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

In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She'd want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run somewhere safe with her. — Lauren Groff

I love you beyond love.'
'Me too,' she said. — Lauren Groff

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

Women in narratives were always defined by their relations. — Lauren Groff

Lotto had made the story of their meeting a coup de foudre, but he was a born storyteller. He recast reality into a different kind of truth. It was, as she knew, actually a coup de foutre. Their marriage had always been about the sex. It had been about other things at first and would be about other things later, of course, but within days it was about the sex. — Lauren Groff

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on. — Lauren Groff

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

As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing. — Lauren Groff

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! — Lauren Groff

The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations' lies. — Lauren Groff

I want to eat your life — Lauren Groff

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

Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath. — Lauren Groff

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.] — Lauren Groff

He went beatboxing to the bathroom, and when he came back, he brought a stench with him. The boy behind him kicked his shirt and out fell a tiny poop. — Lauren Groff

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

We will return to them. For now, he's the one we can't look away from. He is the shining one.] — Lauren Groff

It felt as if they'd crossed a bridge a second before it collapsed. — Lauren Groff

He had become, after all, her home. — Lauren Groff

His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song. — Lauren Groff

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said. — Lauren Groff

Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn't sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying. Great — Lauren Groff

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

We're all functions of our societies, right? And we all become who we are because of the invisible forces that mold us. — Lauren Groff

Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in. — Lauren Groff

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

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

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

[This day would bend back and shine itself into everything.] — Lauren Groff

In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world. — Lauren Groff

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

And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms. — Lauren Groff

A love one week tender, and the world was made bright with him. — Lauren Groff

Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts. — Lauren Groff

And this was what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our strong hearts, our long-lost childhoods. Sunshine in a field and crickets and the sweet tealeaf stink of a new ball mitt and a rock glinting with mica and a chaw of bubblegum wrapping its sweet tendrils down our throats and the warm breeze up our shorts and the low vibrato of lake loons and the sun and the sun and the warm sun and this is what we felt; the sun. — Lauren Groff

We've been reckless with our gifts." He — Lauren Groff

She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right. She — Lauren Groff

Oh. That's because I've stopped smiling," Mathilde said. "For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don't know why I didn't stop earlier. It's enormously relaxing. — Lauren Groff

My childhood was as conventional as you could get. — Lauren Groff

It occurred to her then that 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. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. — Lauren Groff

She returned to him, pressed his cheeks in her hands. "My eccentric old man, thinking you could fly."
"This time, only my words will fly," he said solemnly. They both cracked up. Almost twenty years together and if blazing heat had turned to warmth, humor, it was less wild but easier to sustain. — Lauren Groff

I'm fine. I'm fine, he says, and fine, fine, repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world. — Lauren Groff

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

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

Stubborn heart,' I said. 'Long memory. Bad mix. — Lauren Groff

He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades. — Lauren Groff

Home, she thought, looking at him. — Lauren Groff

strange, spiky pieces of — Lauren Groff

Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering — Lauren Groff

How would he write without her? [The buried awareness of how completely her hands reached into his work; don't look, Lotto. It'd be like looking at the sun.] — Lauren Groff

A man living in a place that doesn't change doesn't expect it ever will. — Lauren Groff

They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents' manners. — Lauren Groff

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

She shouldn't have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she'd had for so very, very long. — Lauren Groff

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

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

No coffee either, caffeine withdrawal the real tragedy here. — Lauren Groff

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern's name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn't do anything at all. — Lauren Groff

A tiger of light from the transoms prowled the clean pine floor. — Lauren Groff

Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness. — Lauren Groff

No more risking the hurt that came from contact with others. — Lauren Groff

Security, a hypothetical, remaining to be proved. — Lauren Groff

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

Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure. There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with — Lauren Groff

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

Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it. — Lauren Groff

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. — Lauren Groff

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

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

It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs. — Lauren Groff

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for. — Lauren Groff

All I'm saying is that worrying about it isn't going to fix anything. The only thing we can do is keep on with our own small thing and try hard to be good and to make life better, and know that if it all ends tomorrow that we were at least happy. — Lauren Groff

Hey. Look at me. You're being ridiculous, and not because you have woman parts. — Lauren Groff

Family being the most important thing in the world. The most important. Why, it's your family that tells you who you are. Without a family, you're a nobody. — Lauren Groff