Lauren Groff Quotes

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.

Some do not understand that we must die, But those who do realize this settle their quarrels.

Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.

A thousand approaches lie open to death.

We know that death never skips or spares anybody and that no one ever returns. And yet we go on like the blind, who see as little at midday as in the pitch-dark night. We do not take these examples to heart; we do not realize that today or tomorrow our turn will come.

Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

age is nothing but death that is conscious.

We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.

The only thing one can do one day one did not do the day before is to die.

Life is a forced state! I am surprized that we live, rather than that our friends die.

The amount of guilt you deal with as a parent is pretty profound. It's a constant balancing act. I'm an ambitious person, but when I became a father, ambition had a different hold on me. Providing for my kids was important, but the superficial ambition drifted away.

I'm quite amused by the attempt to excuse not trying harder, by claiming that perfect is not possible; it may not be, but striving toward it as an ideal is! It is in the act of 'striving' that we demonstrate character, courage, and conscience.

The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.

The great thing about literature is that you're making up your own interpretation of the character anyway. Also, you're given basically a bible of who a character is and you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot if you're not reading it.

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

Life is full of toil, sacrifice, and pain, and from the time we stop growing, we know that we've begun dying. We watch helplessly as year by year, our bodies age and fail, while our survival instincts compel us to keep on going-which means living with the terrifying knowledge that ultimately death is inescapable.

I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.

The elevation of appearance over substance, of celebrity over character, of short term gains over lasting achievement displays a poverty of ambition. It distracts you from what's truly important.

Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honor, and pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?

In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.

Would you have a strong and virile nation, keep your homes pure; would you reduce delinquency and crime, lessen the number of broken homes. It is time that civilized peoples realized that prevention is more profitable than punishment, and that the home is the incubator either of children of high character or of criminals. Home building, therefore, should be the paramount purpose of parents and of the nation.