Top 200 Lauren Groff Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Lauren Groff

52. “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

53. “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

54. “She would spend all weekend alone in the bathtub with a book and a bottle of wine. She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

56. “Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.”

— Lauren Groff

57. “She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”

— Lauren Groff

58. “How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.”

— Lauren Groff

59. “The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair.”

— Lauren Groff

60. “Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.”

— Lauren Groff

61. “It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.”

— Lauren Groff

62. “Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.”

— Lauren Groff

63. “Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.”

— Lauren Groff

64. “How swift, the slippage from keeping it together to losing it.”

— Lauren Groff

65. “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

66. “A mother’s job is to prop open all possible doors for her children.”

— Lauren Groff

67. “In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”

— Lauren Groff

68. “The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation that would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.”

— Lauren Groff

69. “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

70. “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

71. “Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.”

— Lauren Groff

72. “Jude understood then how even the things you loved most could kill you. He stored this knowledge in his bones and thought of it with every decision he made from then on.”

— Lauren Groff

73. “Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. 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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “A tiger of light from the transoms prowled the clean pine floor.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

78. “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

79. “Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then.”

— Lauren Groff

80. “It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.”

— Lauren Groff

81. “The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.”

— Lauren Groff

82. “And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.”

— Lauren Groff

83. “Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you’re actively miserable.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

85. “The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?”

— Lauren Groff

86. “There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time.”

— Lauren Groff

87. “She had to believe of herself that the better story was the true one, even if the worse was insistent.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

89. “In they’d come, integers; out they came, squared.”

— Lauren Groff

90. “He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.”

— Lauren Groff

91. “She’d never met a child with beady eyes before. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age.”

— Lauren Groff

92. “What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear.”

— Lauren Groff

93. “She was crushed with gratitude.”

— Lauren Groff

94. “This is either the eye or we’ve made it through, I said. Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know.”

— Lauren Groff

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.”

— Lauren Groff

98. “A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit.”

— Lauren Groff

99. “Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.”

— Lauren Groff

100. “But I’ve married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.”

— Lauren Groff