Lauren Groff

“In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”

“Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.”

“He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.”

“He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.”

“He can only bear tragedy if it's abstract.”

“They can wound, stories, they can blister.”

“Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.”

“No words could possibly contain all he has to say. He manages to utter, at last, I'm okay, and this is enough for now.”

“Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.”

“Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it.”

“And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he'd had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.”

“If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.”

“Bit believes the treats' chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like.”

“His heart...responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.”

“The stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear...a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...”

“...because when you've had a good enough Teacher, you're all your own Leaders.”

“He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.”

“They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb.It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.”

“Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”

“And this was what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our strong 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 its 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.”

“If he cannot be infinite - his lov emeeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadows - this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.”

“The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation that would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.”

“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.”

“Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.”

“Famous people consume us because we are bored.”

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”

“My Templeton is to Cooperstown as a shadow is to the tree that spawned it; an outline that takes texture from the ground it falls on.”

“...no genius, I am a girl who knows too much to know anything at all...”

“Publilius Syrus come to me: Amor animi arbitrio sumitur, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.”

“Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.”

“...all I'm saying is that worrying about it isn't going to fix anything. The only thing we can do is keep on with our own small thing and try hard to be good and to make life better, and know that if it all ends tomorrow that we were at least happy.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it's impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past.”

“...right now, right now, I am strange. It is strange. This life is strange. For now, only for now, I am happy.”

“Little Sally is beheading daisies on the drive... couldn't be more eloquent if she could speak...”

“...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.”

“Stubborn heart,' I said. 'Long memory. Bad mix.”

“There was the stink of burning martyr in the air.”

“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 strong 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is no ending, no neatness... where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.”

“In the far reaches of the county, cottages were found with skeletons enlaced in the beds, the bones of the baby in the kettle.”

“A man living in a place that doesn't change doesn't expect it ever will.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”