Lauren Groff Quotes

The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.
Lauren Groff
Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue. Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You are unworthy of her. Yes. No. Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky.They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination. Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turns skyward. Is this drizzle? It is. Sound of small sheers closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty and here it is, the separation.
Lauren Groff
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
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
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
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
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
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
There is little that a puppy won't fix, even if the fix is for a short time.
Lauren Groff
Struggle forms character
Lauren Groff
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
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
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
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
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
Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax.
Lauren Groff
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
Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic.
Lauren Groff
We have all had stupid youths,' said Mathilde. 'I find them delicious.
Lauren Groff
He had become, after all, her home.
Lauren Groff
Her hands warming on tea looked like chunks of knitting a child had felted in grubby palms. Enough decades, and a body slowly twists into one great cramp, but there was a time once, where she had been sexy, and if not sexy, at least odd-looking enough to compel. Through this clear window she could see how good it all had been. She had no regrets. That's not true, Mathilde. The whisper in the ear. Oh, Christ, yes, there was one. Solitary, gleaming, a regret. It was that all her life she had said no. From the beginning she had let so few people in. That first night, his young face glowing up a hers in the black light, bodies beating the air around them, and inside there was that unexpected sharp recognition, oh, this. A sudden peace arriving for her. She who hadn't been at peace since she was so little. Out of nowhere, out of this surprising night with its shatters of lightning and the stormy black campus outside, with the heat and song and sex and animal fear inside. He had seen her and made the leap and swung through the crowd and taken her hand, this bright boy who was giving her a place to rest. He offered not only his whole laughing self, the past that build him and the warm beating body that moved her with its beauty and the future she felt compressed and waiting, but also the torch he carried before him in the dark, his understanding, dazzling, instant, that there was goodness at her core. With the gift came the bitter seed of regret, the unbridgeable gap between the Mathilde she was and the Mathilde he had seen her to be. A question, in the end, of vision. She wished she'd been the kind Mathilde, the good one, his idea of her. She would have looked smiling down at him, she would've heard beyond marry me to the world that spun behind the words. There would have been no pause, no hesitation. She would've laughed, touched his face for the first time, felt his warmth in the palm of her hand.'Yes,' she would've said. 'Sure.
Lauren Groff
Struggle forms character. No struggle, no character.
Lauren Groff
The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves.She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening.When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away.'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'...'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them.'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.'...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her.He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her.'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.'In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.
Lauren Groff
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
Lauren Groff
Ever since the other boy had arrived half way through the semester, he'd been so blue, he was practically iridescent.
Lauren Groff
What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.
Lauren Groff
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
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
All she had ahead of her was the cold water, the slow ballet.
Lauren Groff
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
Don't they understand what fiction is?
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
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
When Sally stopped crying, she found herself alone, the cold draft of the window at her neck, and on both sides, the rows of doors went on and on, diminishing to nothing, the end. 'What fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight, oh.' What glories.Mathilde came. And though she appeared to be the... same sweet girl Sally had been afraid of, she was not. Sally saw the flint in her. Mathilde can save Lotto from his own laziness, Sally thought. But here they were, a year later, and he was still ordinary. The chorus caught in her throat. A stranger hurrying as fast as he could over the icy sidewalks looked in. He saw a circle of singing people bathed in the clean, white light from a tree, and his heart did a soumersault. And the image stayed with him, it merged with him even as he came home to his own children, who were already asleep in their beds, to his wife crossly putting together the tricycle without the screwdriver he'd run out to borrow. It remained long after his children ripped open their gifts and abandoned their toys and puddles of paper and grew too old for them and left their house and parents and childhoods, so that he and his wife gaped at each other in bewilderment as to how it had happened so terribly swiftly. All those years, the singers in the soft light in the basement apartment crystalized in his mind, became the very idea of what happiness should look like.
Lauren Groff
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
When your family dismisses you, like Lotto's did, you create your own family
Lauren Groff
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
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
What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.
Lauren Groff
Life was rich with possibility, or life was possibly rich...She felt incandescent with the news.Cold sun. Jack in the pulpits nosing out of the still-frozen mud. Lotto lay watching the world incrementally wake up. 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 physical being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of the sudden, the dark whip at the center of her, how, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. She put her cold hand on his stomach, which he was sunning to banish the winter's white. 'Vain,' she said. 'An actor in a playwright's hide,' he said. 'I'll never not be vain.''Oh well, it's you,' she said. 'You're desperate for the love of strangers, to be seen.''You see me,' he said. And he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased.'I do,' she said. 'Now please, talk.'She stretched her arms over heads...she looked at him, savoring her own knowing, his unknowing...
Lauren Groff
Mathilde and Lotto held hands in the taxi going to brunch, communicating, not speaking.
Lauren Groff
...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
It as mathematical, marriage, not, as one might expect, additional; it was exponential. This one man, nervous in a suite a size too small for his long, lean self, this woman, in a green lace dress cut to the upper thigh, with a white rose behind her ear. Christ, so young. The woman before them was a unitarian minister, and on her buzzed scalp, the grey hairs shone in a swab of sun through the lace in the window. Outside, Poughkeepsie was waking. Behind them, a man in a custodian's uniform cried softly beside a man in pajamas with a Dachshund, their witnesses, a shine in everyone's eye. One could taste the love on the air, or maybe that was sex, or maybe that was all the same then.'I do,' she said.'I do,' he said.They did. They would. Our children will be so fucking beautiful, he thought, looking at her. Home, she thought, looking at him. 'You may kiss,' said the officiant. They did, would. Now they thanked everyone and laughed, and papers were signed and congratulations offered, and all stood for a moment, unwilling to leave this gentile living room where there was such softness. The newlyweds thanked everyone again, shyly, and went out the door into the cool morning. They laughed, rosy. In they'd come integers, out they came, squared. Her life, in the window, the parakeet, scrap of blue midday in the London dusk, ages away from what had been most deeply lived. Day on a rocky beach, creatures in the tide pool. All those ordinary afternoons, listening to footsteps in the beams of the house, and knowing the feeling behind them. Because it was so true, more than the highlights and the bright events, it was in the daily where she'd found life. The hundreds of time she'd dug in her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often that this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell delineated the warmth she'd felt in the cherry orchard. Or this, each day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her 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 in her body to meet him. These silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions, or spectacular fucks. Anyway, that part was finished. A pity...
Lauren Groff
It was mathematical, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.
Lauren Groff
Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.
Lauren Groff
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
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
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
Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn't politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.'He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd...'Did you just say that women aren't creative geniuses because they have babies?''No," he said, 'No. Not because. I wouldn't say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we're all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that's a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she's creating so much more than just a world on the page, she's creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it's so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it's because they're making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It's a kind of bodily genius. You can't tell me that isn't at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward.
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
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
a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.
Lauren Groff
she'd played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
Lauren Groff