Fates and Furies Quotes

“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

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

“[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

“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

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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Your words have more weight than most people’s. You swing them wildly and you can hurt a lot of people,”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“[The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.]”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Oh. That’s because I’ve stopped smiling,” Mathilde said. “For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don’t know why I didn’t stop earlier. It’s enormously relaxing.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“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, Fates and Furies

“Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to! Like corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they'd swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies