Florida Quotes

“She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata.

She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“My eyes were closed and I was almost asleep when I said, Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world?

Oh ,yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She is exhausting to everyone.

She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn't have that option.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“He’s like a perfect, windless pond, her husband once said. You throw something in just to watch it sink, and you’re going to see it on the bottom staring back at you for the rest of your life.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world? Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“and I yelp aloud because of the swiftness of youth, these gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she though: men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. There were like children, gobbling down their candy all at once, with no thought about the consequences of their greed.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Jude understood then how even the things you loved most could kill you. He stored this knowledge in his bones and thought of it with every decision he made from then on.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“during sleepless nights, when my body is in bed but my brain is still out walking in the dark,”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“What had been built to seem so solid was fragile in the face of time because time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering. Even this cabin with its perfectly considered angles, its veins of pipes and wires, was barely more stable than the rake marks we made in the dust that morning, which time had already scrubbed way.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“My husband is an almost entirely good person, and I say this as someone who believes that our better angels are matched by our bitterest devils, and there’s a constant battle happening inside all of us: a giant cockfight.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She misses believing in God.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“Words were space carved out of life, warm and safe.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“This is either the eye or we’ve made it through, I said. Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“was everything we had fretted about, this passive Queen of Chaos with her bloody duct-tape crown.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She could feel the ocean pulling at her back but didn’t turn to say goodbye. It had failed to do what she had longed for it to do; it had been indifferent, after all.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“She curled into a ball to gather her strength and lay there, crying with anger and exhaustion. She was alone and she conceded to her aloneness, she would always be alone, she would always be in these puddles that grew even as she lay in them. For a very long time, she lay there, and it wasn’t terrible, despite the wind and rain upon her. It was only blank.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida

“I hope they understand, my sons, both now and in the future just materializing in the dark, that all these hours their mother has been walking so swiftly away from them I have not been gone, that my spirit, hours ago, slipped back into the house and crept into the room where their early-rising father had already fallen asleep, usually before eight p.m., and that I touched this gentle man whom I love so desperately and somehow fear so much, touched him on the pulse in his temple and felt his dreams, which are too distant for the likes of me; and I climbed the creaking old stairs and at the top split in two, and heading into the boys’ separate rooms, I slid through the crack under the doors and curled myself on the pillows to breathe into me the breath that my children breathed out. Every pause between the end of one breath and the beginning of the next is long; then again, nothing is not always in transition. Soon, tomorrow, the boys will be men, then the men will leave the house, and my husband and I will look at each other crouching under the weight of all that we wouldn’t or couldn’t yell, as well as all those hours outside walking together, my body, my shadow, and the moon. It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing. But it is not laughing at us, we lonely humans, who are far too small and our lives far too fleeting for it to give us any notice at all.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida