Top 200 Lauren Groff Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

211. “The daily kills her greatness.”

— Lauren Groff

212. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

218. “Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering.”

— Lauren Groff

219. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

221. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

224. “The subprioress wraths herself outside to collect the eggs.”

— Lauren Groff

225. “Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.”

— Lauren Groff

226. “Time compresses, springs forward.”

— Lauren Groff

227. “Nothing can drive out the disease: not praying, not bathing them in holy water, not tying them to their beds, not leaping out from the night to frighten them, not holding them by the ankle in the cold river, not beating them around the head with a yew branch, not burying them crown to toe in warm manure, not hanging them upside down from a high tree and spinning them until they vomit, not drilling a tiny hole through their skulls to let the bad humors out of the brains.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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