Lauren Groff Quotes

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

I honestly, purposely have not gone to therapy because I know some crazy stuff's going to be dragged up and, you know, I'll be like, 'Wait, what?'

I don't worry. I'm more stoical. Of course I have insecurities. I fear getting older. I fear death and illness. I'm not prone to depression, but I get depressed because everybody gets depressed. Suddenly I'm away from my family or doing a job I'm not enjoying.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

The world's my oyster. But it worries me, all this showing off about being happy. Life is so precarious, and I know terrible things can happen. At the moment, everything is happy.

And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

We are human. Some days are harder than others. One day something will upset me more than it would have the day before.

Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

In grief we know the worst of what we feel but who can tell the end of what we fear?

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

I have a nightmare about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown] killing each other. Not every month, but now and then. I also have a recurring dream about losing.

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

...desperation can toy with you and if you give desperation any wiggle room, it will find alternative answers

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

My day-mind can endure / Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. / But O, afraid, unsure, / My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

I don't say anything and I feel awful. I tell somebody and I feel worse. I'm having trouble finding a middle ground.

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

I am desperate and vulnerable. ... I am always terrified.... Beauty can sometimes be so very troublesome.

I can face anything, except the future, and certain parts of the past and present.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

I know that we often tremble at an empty terror; yet the false fancy brings a real misery.

She was scared Unprepared Lost in the dark Falling apart I can't survive Without you by my side We're gonna be alright This is what happens when Two worlds collide.