Lauren Groff quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Lauren Groff has a lot to say. In this list we present the 59 best Lauren Groff quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Lauren Groff quotes
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
— Lauren Groff
But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who’d picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was human to everyone but me.When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell.And, after that: Hallelujah.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person.
— 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
Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that gets the prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
I like a bit of spunk in a lady
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
she’d played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Also the fact that he’s a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she’s like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he’s doing what boys do.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.
— Lauren Groff
It’s true, ‘ Mathilde said after some time, ‘I could breathe fire.’She thought of how Lotto, in later years, had been called the lion. With his dander up, he could roar. He looked leonine too, his carrona of white-shot gold, the fine, sharp cheekbones. He’d leap on stage, offended by some actor flubbing his precious lines, and there he’d pace, sleek and swift with his long lovely body, growling. He could be deadly, fierce, the name was not inapt, but please, Mathilde knew lions. The male lolled beautifully, lazy in the sun. The female, less lovely by miles, was the one who brought back the kill.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over, and it was sunset, and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was. He said, ‘spiral jetty.’She said, ”In sand?’ He smiled and said, ‘That’s its beauty.’A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hand’t seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth, a sweetness, a sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers. Instead, she bent and helped, they all did. And deep into the morning, when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed somehow
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
And they spoke of their Antigonie, who they called Go, as if she were a friend.Leo hadn’t yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy’s own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo’s jaw in profile, devestating. The way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape, the smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleaching. The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.The weather conspired. Snow fell softly in the windows. It was too cold to be out for long. The world colorless, a dreamscape, a blank page, the linger of woodsmoke on the back of the tongue.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
And though Lotto was thoroughly straight, the daily greedy need of his hands told her this, her husband’s desire had always been more to chase and capture the gleam of the person inside the body and the body itself. And there was a part of her husband that had always been so hungry for beauty.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
It was mathematical, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Mathilde and Lotto held hands in the taxi going to brunch, communicating, not speaking.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
…then he blushed and seemed to fade where he stood….When the musical star moved on, Lotto turned to her and silently docked his head on her shoulder for two moments, recharged he turned to face the others.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
She returned to him, pressed his cheeks in her hands. “My eccentric old man, thinking you could fly.””This time, only my words will fly, ” he said solemnly. They both cracked up. Almost twenty years together and if blazing heat had turned to warmth, humor, it was less wild but easier to sustain.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it’s impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
We need a mass of ancestors at our backs like a balast. Sometimes, we feel it’s impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past.
— Lauren Groff
And she had pushed, or she hadn’t. The result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she’d been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this? How could she not have been forgiven?
— Lauren Groff
The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation that would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
Don’t they understand what fiction is?
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
All she had ahead of her was the cold water, the slow ballet.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
This was the bad version. This version was what later events told her had happened. It was as real as the other. They played simultaneously in a loop, yet Mathilde could never quite believe it. That twitch of a leg, a later insertion, surely. She could not believe, and yet something in her did believe, and this contradiction that she held within her became the source of everything. All that remained were the facts. Before it all happened she had been so beloved, afterward, love had been withdrawn. And she had pushed or she hadn’t, the result had been all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her, but she had been so very young. How could parents do this? How could she not have been forgiven?
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.’ Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife. ‘I am nothing, ‘ Alice said after Gertrude dies, ‘but a memory of her.’…the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again…
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Ever since the other boy had arrived half way through the semester, he’d been so blue, he was practically iridescent.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband’s mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, though her stationary had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sally was starch, cedar, her dead grandmother sandalwood, her uncle, swiss cheese. People told her she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return. ‘Land, ‘ Mathilde said, ‘odd name for a guy like you.”Short for Roland, ‘ the boy said.Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.’Alright Roland, ‘ Mathilde said, suppressing as sigh, ‘sing your song.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.He loved the uselessness of all the effort, the ephemerality of the work. The ocean encroached, it licked their feet. It pushed around the outside wall of the spiral, fingering its way in. When the water had scooped the sand from the lifeguard’s chair, revealing white like bone beneath, something broke, and the fragments spun into the future. This day would bend back and shine itself into everything.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto’s shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago he’d been a kid, thinking about his nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and signs. Now he was, heavy, adult.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
On the nights I stuffed myself full of myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chicken.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
Struggle forms character. No struggle, no character.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
He had become, after all, her home.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
We have all had stupid youths, ‘ said Mathilde. ‘I find them delicious.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
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
Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
And Lotto beamed with pleasure, preening, eyes darting around to see which kind soul in the room could have sent along the champagne, the force of his delight such that wherever his eyes landed, the recipients of the gaze would look up out of their food and conversation. and a startled expression would come over their face, a flush, and nearly everyone began grinning back, so that on this spangled early evening with the sun shining through the windows in gold streams, and the treetops rustling in the wind, and the streets full of congregating, relieved people, Lotto sparked upwellings of inexplicable glee in dozens of chests, lightening the already buoyant mood in one swift wave. Animal magnetism is real. It spreads through bodily convection. Even Ariel smiled back. The stunned grin stayed on the faces of some people, an expressions of speculation growing, hoping he would look at them again, or wondering who he was because on this day, and in this world, he was someone.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Did you?’ the producer said. ‘He’s so clownish on the surface, all joke and dazzle. How in the world could you have seen it?”But I did. The moment I met him, ” she said. “A fucking supernova. Every day since.’ She thought, but did not say, almost.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
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
Struggle forms character
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
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
And this was what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our strong hearts, our long-lost childhoods. Sunshine in a field and crickets and the sweet tealeaf stink of a new ball mitt and a rock glinting with mica and a chaw of bubblegum wrapping its sweet tendrils down our throats and the warm breeze up our shorts and the low vibrato of lake loons and the sun and the sun and the warm sun and this is what we felt; the sun.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
The stories themselves aren’t what moves him now…What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire…The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear…a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods…
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
His heart…responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.
— Lauren Groff, Arcadia
He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
There aren’t very many good models of feminine rage – and the ones that we remember are ones where women take that anger internally and implode themselves in a real way, like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary.
— Lauren Groff
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