Top 250 Lauren Groff Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.”

— Lauren Groff

202. “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

203. “And later, as the bells for Matins sounded in the dark and she walked back in the darkness as though blind, she wondered if in fact this has been the closest she had been to God – not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil – but the nothing at the center of the self.”

— Lauren Groff

204. “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

205. “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

206. “There is nothing wrong, she thinks, in taking pride in the work of one’s body. She has never been convinced by any argument for abasement. Surely god, who has done all good work, wants work to be done well.”

— Lauren Groff

207. “For, if a bear could feel awe, then a bear could certainly know god.”

— Lauren Groff

208. “All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.”

— Lauren Groff

209. “She rises, they hush. She speaks. She tells movingly of what she has seen in town, the poor mother leper and her child, the spitting, the human life lesser than that of street bitches with their teats scraping the earth. How in the Bible, the lepers are healed with love. How it is the nuns’ duty to care for the most wretched of the earth.”

— Lauren Groff

210. “Its imagination had been limited by the closeness of the walls of the room, the smallest tooth of sky seen through the window, the stifling inside air, the worms fed it one by one out of the hand of the queen.”

— Lauren Groff

211. “Marie sees again the Ladies’ Army pouring down a hillside in the Byzantine Empire, riding astride unwomanly, shouting, swords drawn, their hair loosed and flying behind them, all in the white and red tunics, ululating, fearsome.”

— Lauren Groff

212. “We will return to them. For now, he’s the one we can’t look away from. He is the shining one.”

— Lauren Groff

213. “And humans were not made to be always alone; humans survive only in the company of other humans.”

— Lauren Groff

214. “For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men.”

— Lauren Groff

215. “She could feel the ocean pulling at her back but didn’t turn to say goodbye. It had failed to do what she had longed for it to do; it had been indifferent, after all.”

— Lauren Groff

216. “Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not.”

— Lauren Groff

217. “The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.”

— Lauren Groff

218. “Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.”

— Lauren Groff

219. “And the works and the hours go on.”

— Lauren Groff

220. “For, inches beyond this face of hers and in the profoundest sufferings of her body, the world went on in its grand and renewing and wholly indifferent beauty.”

— Lauren Groff

221. “Never. Never for me. I’d die first. Never’s a liar.”

— Lauren Groff

222. “When she woke, she stood to walk forward once more, and this new suffering, which in the city of her birth would have made her mewl like a babe and take to a cot, was hardly a ripple in all the waves of what she felt.”

— Lauren Groff

223. “The daily kills her greatness.”

— Lauren Groff

224. “Eden would overtake the world and the mistake of man would be forgot.”

— Lauren Groff

225. “Ever since the other boy had arrived half way through the semester, he’d been so blue, he was practically iridescent.”

— Lauren Groff

226. “And female bodies are not as strong in muscle; though it must be said there is no greater strength than the power in their wombs to create life.”

— Lauren Groff

227. “She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat.”

— Lauren Groff

228. “She straps on her sword, holds her heavy abbess’s staff in her left hand. She rides out.”

— Lauren Groff

229. “I loved books like people; I liked real people less.”

— Lauren Groff

230. “And the girl listened to the pinprick of light she had carried within her heart, which she felt all this time was god. And it was there in the hovel, as she gazed upon the gazing bear, that nothing replied to her, and nothing echoed back.”

— Lauren Groff

231. “Only when she has re-created in ink upon parchment what she saw does she fully understand it. Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.”

— Lauren Groff

232. “Humans were never meant to live alone.”

— Lauren Groff

233. “As is the truth of all the people who have walked and will walk upon the earth, she returned at last to all she had been before life.”

— Lauren Groff

234. “Before the girl begins to wail and Marie crosses the room to plunge the burnt hand into the washing water, 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.”

— Lauren Groff

235. “There Marie and Ursule sat at the foot of the trees, letting their thoughts dissolve to make themselves more like the roots of the trees they sat upon and erase some of what was human in them.”

— Lauren Groff

236. “Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering.”

— Lauren Groff

237. “Naming, she understood, made things more visible.”

— Lauren Groff

238. “O put the memory away, girl, she told herself sternly. For the sorrow could eat you entire.”

— Lauren Groff

239. “For what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin, and quickened her steps to get away.”

— Lauren Groff

240. “She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them. But.”

— Lauren Groff

241. “The ladders had been withdrawn. The angels were gone. The angels had left her alone upon this world.”

— Lauren Groff

242. “And later, as the bells for Matins sounded in the dark and she walked back in the darkness as though blind, she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to god – not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil – but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.”

— Lauren Groff

243. “Words were space carved out of life, warm and safe.”

— Lauren Groff

244. “I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing.”

— Lauren Groff

245. “Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing. A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past. It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.”

— Lauren Groff

246. “Collapse is the constant state of humanity, she tells herself; the story of the flood and the great ark that saved the creatures two by two is only the first refrain of a song that is to be sung over and over, the earth’s gradual and repeated diminishment, civilization foundering to dust, until the final death of the children of Eve with the apocalypse, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven angels, the seven bowls.”

— Lauren Groff

247. “Yes, she thought, this is right. Old carrion bird, bringing your reek of death to me.”

— Lauren Groff

248. “What women can do when given a task! Their abilities seem limitless.”

— Lauren Groff

249. “No, she said, for the blight of the english will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first; it will slaughter them, diminish them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves.”

— Lauren Groff

250. “I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.”

— Lauren Groff