Lauren Groff > Quotes

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Or this: every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her up with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black. Almost unremarked upon, this kindness. He would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she’d feel something in her rising through her body to meet him. These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb.

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

“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

“Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

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

“She said nothing, eloquently.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata.

She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“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

“Even then, she knew that there is no such thing as sure. There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Home, she thought, looking at him.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Happiness feeds but doesn’t nourish.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“She would spend all weekend alone in the bathtub with a book and a bottle of wine. She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“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

“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

“It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“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

“My eyes were closed and I was almost asleep when I said, Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world?

Oh ,yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida