Lauren Groff Quotes

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

No matter how people mess with you or let you down, or how you let yourself down, a good book means that when you get in bed that night, you have a good hour. I feel like you pay all day for that hour. That's what books mean to me. I can open this two-dimensional , flat white page with squiggly little black marks on them, and someone has created this world that you're going to enter into.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.

I spent a lot of time in my head, but not like caring about what everybody else thought, just literally in my own world.

I take a lot of enjoyment out of imagining myself as... I dunno... a wall. I keep adding bricks to my wall or little house.

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Reading gives you some place to go when you have to stay where you are.

I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.

I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

She had begun to read in the beginning as a protection from the frightening and unpleasant things. She continued because, apart from the story, literature brought with it a kind of gentility for which she craved.

I think a lot of us who are in books now were nervous children.

When I read books it's to escape. It's so I don't have to talk to people.

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

What I would most like to think they would take away, is what I take away when I read my favorite books. Which is the knowledge that there is always somewhere you can go, that you love, and where you're safe. And that's how I feel about my favorite books, wherever I am, if I've got that book with me, I've got a place where I can go and be happy. So if that place is Hogwarts for anyone, then I couldn't be more honored or humbled.

Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.

Back when I was very small, and we had this bathroom with these sort of paneled mirrors on the side. And I would just sit there - because it was the only warm room in the house. And I would - if I was in a bad place - I would go to my imaginary place with these mirrors, and create this entire other world to sort of help level out what I was dealing with.