Lauren Groff

“In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.”
― Lauren Groff

“When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.”
― Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

“Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“...no genius, I am a girl who knows too much to know anything at all...”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.”
― Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

“She would always feel this wild girl was the truest of any of the people she had already been: adored daughter, bourgeois priss, rebel, runaway, dope-fiend San Francisco hippie; or all the people she would later be: mother, nurse, religious fanatic, prematurely old woman. Vivienne was a human onion, and when I came home at twenty eight years old on the day the monster died, I was afraid that the Baptist freak she had peeled down to was her true, acrid, tear-inducing core.”
― Lauren Groff

“Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“[Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“[Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“She shouldn't have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she'd had for so very, very long.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“[The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“A man living in a place that doesn't change doesn't expect it ever will.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies