Lauren Groff

“I like a bit of spunk in a lady”

“Doomed people celebrate peace with sky bombs.”

“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 Before it all happened she had been so beloved, afterward, love had been withdrawn.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?”

“We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.”

“There aren't very many good models of feminine rage - and the ones that we remember are ones where women take that anger internally and implode themselves in a real way, like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary.”

“While I know some women who are stunningly sanguine when they're pregnant, I dissolve into a total mess. What normally appears sturdy turns fragile: the economy, the climate, humanity's baseline social contract.”

“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.”

“she'd played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.”

“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.”

“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...”

“We have all had stupid youths,' said Mathilde. 'I find them delicious.”

“But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.”

“Mathilde and Lotto held hands in the taxi going to brunch, communicating, not speaking.”

“Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.”

“I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won't work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won't - and that's fine.”

“A lot of books about marriage are about marriages falling apart.”

“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.”

“At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.”

“Marriage seems to be predicated on protecting a very deep and intimate form of mystery.”