287 Quotes by Lauren Groff

What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.

He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.

I'm fine. I'm fine, he says, and fine, fine repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.

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.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing.

It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.

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.

Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn't know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.