Groff Quotes & Sayings

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

You say that as if he's sick," Mathilde said. "He is. Great American Artistitis, — Lauren Groff

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

Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over, and it was sunset, and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was.
He said, 'spiral jetty.'
She said, 'In sand?'
He smiled and said, 'That's its beauty.'
A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hand't seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth, a sweetness, a sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.
Instead, she bent and helped, they all did. And deep into the morning, when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed somehow — Lauren Groff

My name is Zak Bagans. I've never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with one. So I set out on a quest to capture what I once saw onto video ... With no big camera crews following us around, I am joined only by my fellow investigator Nick Groff and our equipment tech Aaron Goodwin. The three of us will travel to the some of most highly active paranormal locations, where we will spend an entire night, being locked down from dusk until dawn ... Raw ... Extreme ... These are our Ghost Adventures. — Zak Bagans

Kipling called it a very long conversation. — Lauren Groff

The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow. I — Lauren Groff

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

From a mile away, the sound. The sirens. — Lauren Groff

Even you couldn't have magicked that into being, witch, — 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

God, says Handy, or the Eternal Spark, is in every human heart, in every piece of this earth. In this rock, in this ice, in this plant, this bird. All deserve our gentleness. The — Lauren Groff

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

Don't they understand what fiction is? — Lauren Groff

[Suspend them there, in the mind's eye: skinny, young, coming through dark toward warmth, flying over the cold sand and stone. We will return to them. — Lauren Groff

I'm kind of whatever about nudity. Hopefully I wouldn't be a part of anything, whether I'm naked or not, that I didn't believe in. But I'm pretty comfortable being naked. — Jonathan Groff

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

Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It — Lauren Groff

If he cannot be infinite - his lov emeeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadows - this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending. — 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

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

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

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

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks. — Lauren Groff

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

The gods love to fuck with us. — 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 sculpture of marriage, marriage come alive. Lancelot — Lauren Groff

Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain. — Lauren Groff

He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her. — Lauren Groff

At the end of the day, the end of the movie is sort of ambiguous - it's whatever you want it to be. — Jonathan 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

One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He'd woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral. — Lauren Groff

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

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

Just follow your joy. Always. I think that if you do that, life will take you on the course that it's meant to take you. — Jonathan Groff

You are as dry as vermouth. — 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

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

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

Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person. — Lauren Groff

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore. — Lauren Groff

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

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

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

At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing. — Lauren Groff

Between his skin and hers, there was the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for this slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in. — Lauren Groff

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall. — Lauren Groff

We have all had stupid youths,' said Mathilde. 'I find them delicious. — Lauren Groff

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

[A Leo, which explains him entirely.] — Lauren Groff

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

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

She knew she was the interesting one. "You're a bad liar," he said. She — Lauren Groff

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

This real fucking genius, though I don't really think anybody knew that back then, but there was something in him. Charisma. Gentleness, a kind of acceptance of people for who they are. That's rare, you know? Someone who never, never judges. Most people have a nasty interior monologue going on at all times, not Lotto. He'd rather think kindly of you. Easier that way. — Lauren Groff

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

He'd woken up to the absence of Mathilde in the bed, grief in the coolness where her heat should have been. — Lauren Groff

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

If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave. — 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

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

She couldn't trust pleasure in its pure form. — Lauren Groff

Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax. — Lauren Groff

The man swallowed praise the way runners swallow electrolytes. By — 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

If I were to be back on Glee, I would like to spend some time with Lea Michele because I love her and we go way back. — Jonathan Groff

And they spoke of their Antigonie, who they called Go, as if she were a friend.
Leo hadn't yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy's own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo's jaw in profile, devestating. The way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape, the smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleaching.
The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.
The weather conspired. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page, the linger of woodsmoke on the back of the tongue. — Lauren Groff

The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there. — Lauren Groff

The stories themselves aren't what moves him now ... What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire ... The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear ... a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods ... — Lauren Groff

In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations. — 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

Oh, for the god of love, where did time go? [Clockwise swirl going nowhere.] — Lauren Groff

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

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

Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life. — Lauren Groff

Marriage seems to be predicated on protecting a very deep and intimate form of mystery. — 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

Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely. — Lauren Groff

When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home. — Lauren Groff

There is part of me that longs to have the back-to-the-earth life - make my own bread, grow my own wheat, just be really self-sufficient - but I am not, at the moment, willing to give up the luxury of modern life, and amazing schools for my kids, and things that I've come to rely on that are parts of society. — Lauren Groff

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

The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom. — 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

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

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

A lot of books about marriage are about marriages falling apart. — Lauren Groff

She said nothing, eloquently. — Lauren Groff

The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto's shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he'd been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult. — Lauren Groff

It would probably be softer, less muscular, like sexual yoga. It'd at least be novel. — Lauren Groff

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking. — James Wood

strange, spiky pieces of — Lauren Groff

Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering — Lauren Groff

It would never have ended that way. [True. It was not his time.] — Lauren Groff