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

202. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

204. “The daily kills her greatness.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

206. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

208. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

212. “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

213. “Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

215. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

217. “Time compresses, springs forward.”

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

225. “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

226. “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

227. “It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer.”

— Lauren Groff

228. “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

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

— Lauren Groff

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

— Lauren Groff

231. “She has known prayer in her life, but before tonight it has been prayer like sending a coin with a wish into a body of water, it was hope dispersed vaguely outward. She sent it not toward the stern trinity imposed upon her, but toward the Virgin Mother who wore her own mother’s face. Even in prayer she was rebelling.”

— Lauren Groff