#Lauren Groff

It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.

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How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.

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When I was small and easily wounded, books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book,

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Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with

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Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in

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I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.

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Felt like yesterday, all that bodily joy. Begun so young they didn’t even know what they were doing and they wouldn’t give

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He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the

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She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can

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It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us.

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