Top 200 Lauren Groff Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

205. “The daily kills her greatness.”

— Lauren Groff

206. “Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.”

— Lauren Groff

207. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

209. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

213. “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

214. “Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

216. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

218. “Time compresses, springs forward.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

225. “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

226. “Of her own mind and hands she has shifted the world.”

— Lauren Groff

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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