Top 200 Lauren Groff Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”

— Lauren Groff

103. “The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!”

— Lauren Groff

104. “Home, she thought, looking at him.”

— Lauren Groff

105. “They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.”

— Lauren Groff

106. “You only have so many days in your life to try to be happy.”

— Lauren Groff

107. “I’m always hungry for people.”

— Lauren Groff

108. “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

109. “Whatever happened to all of those friends of ours” Lotto wondered. The ones who had seemed so essential had faded away.”

— Lauren Groff

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “My childhood was as conventional as you could get.”

— Lauren Groff

114. “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

115. “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

116. “A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.”

— Lauren Groff

117. “Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”

— Lauren Groff

118. “Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions – how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.”

— Lauren Groff

119. “Stubborn heart,′ I said. ‘Long memory. Bad mix.”

— Lauren Groff

120. “Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts.”

— Lauren Groff

121. “A man living in a place that doesn’t change doesn’t expect it ever will.”

— Lauren Groff

122. “Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she though: men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. There were like children, gobbling down their candy all at once, with no thought about the consequences of their greed.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

124. “He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her.”

— Lauren Groff

125. “We’ve been reckless with our gifts.” He.”

— Lauren Groff

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.”

— Lauren Groff

130. “Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax.”

— Lauren Groff

131. “Happiness feeds but doesn’t nourish.”

— Lauren Groff

132. “She said nothing, eloquently.”

— Lauren Groff

133. “The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.”

— Lauren Groff

134. “It would probably be softer, less muscular, like sexual yoga. It’d at least be novel.”

— Lauren Groff

135. “It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you’d find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.”

— Lauren Groff

136. “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

137. “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

138. “She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.”

— Lauren Groff

139. “She’s a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge.”

— Lauren Groff

140. “Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.”

— Lauren Groff

141. “In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil.”

— Lauren Groff

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there’s an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader’s head.”

— Lauren Groff

145. “It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.”

— Lauren Groff

146. “Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren’t around.”

— Lauren Groff

147. “The friends had been whittled down. The ones who remained were heartwood, marrow. “I.”

— Lauren Groff

148. “We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.”

— Lauren Groff

149. “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

150. “She misses believing in God.”

— Lauren Groff