Top 200 Lauren Groff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world? Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.”

— Lauren Groff

3. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

5. “While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That’s more than connecting.”

— Lauren Groff

6. “Happy birthday, friend of my heart,” she said.”

— Lauren Groff

7. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

11. “Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing.”

— Lauren Groff

12. “One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

14. “Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It’s also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is “the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders,” as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.”

— Lauren Groff

15. “Little Sally is beheading daisies on the drive... couldn’t be more eloquent if she could speak...”

— Lauren Groff

16. “As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.”

— Lauren Groff

17. “Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself, And so shall starve with feeding. Volumnia says this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. She – steely, controlling – is far more interesting than Coriolanus. Alas, nobody would go to see a play called Volumnia.”

— Lauren Groff

18. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

21. “Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself.”

— Lauren Groff

22. “He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more.”

— Lauren Groff

23. “My husband is an almost entirely good person, and I say this as someone who believes that our better angels are matched by our bitterest devils, and there’s a constant battle happening inside all of us: a giant cockfight.”

— Lauren Groff

24. “So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end.”

— Lauren Groff

25. “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

26. “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

27. “The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.”

— Lauren Groff

28. “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

29. “We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.”

— Lauren Groff

30. “For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

32. “Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.”

— Lauren Groff

33. “Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?”

— Lauren Groff

34. “Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.”

— Lauren Groff

35. “There was the stink of burning martyr in the air.”

— Lauren Groff

36. “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

37. “Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age.”

— Lauren Groff

38. “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

39. “When she shouted, the gulls hidden by the dune buckshot the low clouds.”

— Lauren Groff

40. “A woman growing like a goldfish to the size of her bowl, the only escape the final leap.”

— Lauren Groff

41. “Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?”

— Lauren Groff

42. “We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.”

— Lauren Groff

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

43. “Privilege is what lets you take risks.”

— Lauren Groff

44. “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

45. “And the great Now What stretching without end.”

— Lauren Groff

46. “Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you’d find on a gramophone record.”

— Lauren Groff

47. “He’s like a perfect, windless pond, her husband once said. You throw something in just to watch it sink, and you’re going to see it on the bottom staring back at you for the rest of your life.”

— Lauren Groff

48. “Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.”

— Lauren Groff

49. “Go back to what you know,” she said. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “You know me,” she said. He looked at her, his face smeary with newsprint, and began to smile. “I do,” he said.”

— Lauren Groff

50. “She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.”

— Lauren Groff