Quotes from Lauren Groff

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

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.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it. You know how in New York there's a lot of scaffolding? I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck.

My childhood was as conventional as you could get.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

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

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

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.

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.

My childhood was as conventional as you could get. I think I probably created 'Arcadia' with a certain amount of wishful thinking. I would have loved to have more looseness and freedom and community.

At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.

Among so many things, 'Time Passes' has shown me subversive ways of portraying time, of looking away from the human to the far more terrifying, far more immense texture of time beneath the minute span of a human life.

Bigger stories are made out of longer acquaintance with fact and character, but I also love the tiny stories in which almost everything has to be inferred and imagined.

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

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

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

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

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.