quotes by 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)

"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)

"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)

"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

"A man living in a place that doesn't change doesn't expect it ever will."
— 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)

"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)

"...right now, right now, I am strange. It is strange. This life is strange. For now, only for now, I am happy."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)

"In the far reaches of the county, cottages were found with skeletons enlaced in the beds, the bones of the baby in the kettle."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)

"Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions--how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion."
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)

"Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?"
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)

"Then he tells his son, "This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again." He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. "Surfacing," he says."
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)

"As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)

"And as I walked, I believed myself to be an Adam setting foot in a new Eden, sinless and wild-eyed, my sinews still stiff with creation."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)

"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)

"Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow."
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)

"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)

"Then, when we had done so, we put our hands upon the freezing cold monster, our monster. And this is what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our 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 in sweet 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

"There was the stink of burning martyr in the air."
— Lauren Groff

"'Stubborn heart,' I said. 'Long memory. Bad mix.'"
— Lauren Groff

"...sick, my brothers are sending me home. This place infects me. Templeton my smooth little pill... such images I have. Such voices, that high voice, the little girl's so naughty, talking to me, all the time now. How I hate her... the train is empty, Albany a small, spangled fish... this train is all brown velvet... the train slows, I am in Templeton, oh. Templeton, Templeton, the train says, slowing down. The lake, the blue, is an embrace."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)

"Little Sally is beheading daisies on the drive... couldn't be more eloquent if she could speak..."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)