“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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...”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“They can wound, stories, they can blister.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“He can only bear tragedy if it's abstract.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“If he cannot be infinite - his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow - 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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“...because when you've had a good enough Teacher, you're all your own Leaders.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“...when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Bit believes the treats' chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“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.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
“Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.”
― Lauren Groff, quote from Arcadia
Lauren Groff
Born place: in Cooperstown, New York, The United States
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“In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Soul Music
“Yeah, okay. You're right. I was having dinner with Zombie Carl the other night. You know, steak, rare, and a bottle of vintage type A. He told me all his secrets, but too bad for you I promised him I wouldn't tell. In exchange I asked him to gather his best undead buddies and stalk me through my friend's yard. And oh, yeah, it was totally fine if they wanted to use me as an all-night-dinner buffet, because having organs is SO last year.”
― Gena Showalter, quote from Alice in Zombieland
“None of this is quite true but Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.”
― Gore Vidal, quote from Burr
“They obeyed, as wise men do when a woman puts her foot down . . .”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Nation
“That’s right, honey, state your claim on Mr. Yummy Pants. I’d do the same if I were you.”
A grin ticked at my mouth. I swept my gaze over the muscled roundness of Bones’s ass, which his black jeans only highlighted. Then I gazed at the snug fit of the front that had nothing to do with the cut of the denim. Finally, I met Tyler’s chocolate-colored eyes and winked back.”
― Jeaniene Frost, quote from One Grave at a Time
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Antifragile: Things...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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