Quotes by 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 ...”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“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 aroun...”

“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 an...”

“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 t...”

“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 sh...”

“All she had ahead of her was the cold water, the slow ballet.”

“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 wh...”

“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 t...”

“Don't they understand what fiction is?”

“Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.”

“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 stun...”

“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. Tha...”

“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 re...”

“What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.”

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

“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 i...”

“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 ...”

“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 soften...”