Top 200 Lauren Groff Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “In the far reaches of the county, cottages were found with skeletons enlaced in the beds, the bones of the baby in the kettle.”

— Lauren Groff

152. “Three glasses into a bottle of bourbon; it was past four, who cared? He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered.”

— Lauren Groff

153. “Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.”

— Lauren Groff

154. “Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.”

— Lauren Groff

155. “What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.”

— Lauren Groff

156. “When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.”

— Lauren Groff

157. “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

158. “Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual high-wire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations.”

— Lauren Groff

159. “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

160. “The others took a step in, bowed their heads to listen. Holy Communion of scuttlebutt.”

— Lauren Groff

161. “She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.”

— Lauren Groff

162. “Felt like yesterday, all that bodily joy. Begun so young they didn’t even know what they were doing and they wouldn’t give it up, so when they were old enough, they married. Not the worst thing to build a marriage around, such juice. The first years had been delirious, the latter ones merely happy.”

— Lauren Groff

163. “If theres a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.”

— Lauren Groff

164. “We have all had stupid youths,′ said Mathilde. ‘I find them delicious.”

— Lauren Groff

165. “The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.”

— Lauren Groff

166. “She is mad in both senses: angry and insane.”

— Lauren Groff

167. “For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.”

— Lauren Groff

168. “The forest was not dark, because darkness has nothing to do with the forest – the forest is made of life, of light – but the trees moved with wind and subtle creatures.”

— Lauren Groff

169. “Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.”

— Lauren Groff

170. “And then the wind smacked the house. Bring it on! I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is another thing in my absurd life that I whispered.”

— Lauren Groff

171. “But the book is not speaking to her today, Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim, it is speaking to some other woman with no hope in her heart.”

— Lauren Groff

172. “For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandneur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

— Lauren Groff

173. “As she sometimes does when she rides out to the abbey’s estates, she leans forward against the horn of her pommel, and lets the motion of the horse’s gait build against her until she gasps and something in her breaks.”

— Lauren Groff

174. “Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god. News.”

— Lauren Groff

175. “She could give up the burn of singular love inside her and turn into a larger love, she could build around the other women an abbet of the spirit to protect them from cold and wet... she would build an invisible abbey made our of her own self.”

— Lauren Groff

176. “Now, don’t sigh for envy at my week-end; I am sure it is to be dull, my dear, and you know my horrible shyness and how I loathe such things. If only I had your vivacity and beauty! Alas, what we love in others does not always suit ourselves. I shall get through the weekend by wishing you in my place.”

— Lauren Groff

177. “Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability.”

— Lauren Groff

178. “Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.”

— Lauren Groff

179. “Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.”

— Lauren Groff

180. “It’s true that the world is overrun with terrorists. It’s true that the mother no longer goes to movies in theaters, and she scans for the exits in restaurants. Deeper, worse, the death everywhere, the surgical strikes, the eyes in the sky. Aleppo in the beautiful before, the ravaged after. She puts these thoughts away. If she could, she’d spend the entire day in bed.”

— Lauren Groff

181. “Foolish creature, old Marie would say to that child. Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.”

— Lauren Groff

182. “Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.”

— Lauren Groff

183. “Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.”

— Lauren Groff

184. “The abbess is exhausted and pale. She smiles and says, Oh of course I made it up. Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs. And then, lulled by the rocking of her fat little horse, the abbess falls asleep.”

— Lauren Groff

185. “Of course Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness.”

— Lauren Groff

186. “She gorges on it... she understands that she is hungry for more.”

— Lauren Groff

187. “How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.”

— Lauren Groff

188. “Dislike pours out of her toward both Marie and the abbess, a spiritual wind. She has a strong-weak walk like a heartbeat, because a horse stepped on her foot when she was a growing girl and crushed the bones and nerves there. I saw the foot when she came to the abbey oh many decades ago and I had to wash it, it is a mangled horror, the abbess says, it is the stuff of nightmares. Hurts to this day like the flames of hell, Wevua says with satisfaction.”

— Lauren Groff

189. “The queen told Marie to have faith, in time Marie would make a rather good nun. Anyone with eyes could see she had always been meant for holy virginity.”

— Lauren Groff

190. “Those to whom god has given understanding and eloquence must not be silent or hide their gift, but must return the gift so that it flowers under the admiration of others.”

— Lauren Groff

191. “And now that she is old and dying in the close herbed air of the infirmary, she thinks of how strange it is that it is not the long good comfortable times of happiness returning so close to the end, but rather the times of briefest ecstasy, and of darkness, of struggle and passion and hunger and misery.”

— Lauren Groff

192. “Marie thinks, truly, she does not believe she could live her in this bitter, sloven place without at least the consolation of bacon.”

— Lauren Groff

193. “All the people are like grass, the subprioress says suddenly, and their glory is the glory of the field; the grass withers, the flowers fall, but the Word lasts eternal.”

— Lauren Groff

194. “How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life.”

— Lauren Groff

195. “Marie has a swift vision of herself as a tiny figure, climbing the walls; oh someday she will find her way over the queen’s rampart, someday she will be inside, out of the wind. Eleanor will be a model, then, Marie thinks, for her own purpose on the earth, at this abbey she hates so much. She will build around herself walls of wealth and friends and good clear reputation, she will make her frail sisters safe within. Marie will mold herself in the queen’s form, she thinks.”

— Lauren Groff

196. “Please. Prayer is lovely. She herself prays every day. But for such a threat, Marie will need more powerful weapons than prayer. Perhaps she doesn’t know this, having been removed from the world these many years, but to engage in war with the world, one needs the world’s weapons.”

— Lauren Groff

197. “She curled into a ball to gather her strength and lay there, crying with anger and exhaustion. She was alone and she conceded to her aloneness, she would always be alone, she would always be in these puddles that grew even as she lay in them. For a very long time, she lay there, and it wasn’t terrible, despite the wind and rain upon her. It was only blank.”

— Lauren Groff

198. “It is also true that she is sleepless because the curse of Eve has been removing itself from her body in flames that cook Marie from the inside out.”

— Lauren Groff

199. “I like a bit of spunk in a lady.”

— Lauren Groff

200. “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