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1 " Then she wants to say that, oh, Christ, of course she knows, the condescension Europeans shower on Americans is not always warranted; she's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one-woman card catalogue for useless knowledge. "
― Lauren Groff , Florida
2 " Isn't it...dicey? people our parents' age would say, grimacing, when we told them where we lived, and it took all my willpower not to say, Do you mean black, or just poor? Because it was both. "
3 " She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight" Sonata.She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading. "
4 " My eyes were closed and I was almost asleep when I said, Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world?Oh ,yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise. "
5 " She is exhausting to everyone. She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn't have that option. "
6 " All things nauseating and deadly are American, apparently.Well, okay, she can't disagree. "
7 " I'd been sent to Girl Scout Camp... I believed for years afterward that tongues should taste like the clovers we'd sucked for the honey at their roots. "
8 " It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language. "
9 " Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater that she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe. "
10 " He’s like a perfect, windless pond, her husband once said. You throw something in just to watch it sink, and you’re going to see it on the bottom staring back at you for the rest of your life. "
11 " She's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge. "
12 " Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering. "
13 " I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it. "
14 " Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself. "
15 " Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world? Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise. "
16 " and I yelp aloud because of the swiftness of youth, these gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it. "
17 " So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end. "
18 " Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she though: men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. There were like children, gobbling down their candy all at once, with no thought about the consequences of their greed. "
19 " He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more. "
20 " What had been built to seem so solid was fragile in the face of time because time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering. Even this cabin with its perfectly considered angles, its veins of pipes and wires, was barely more stable than the rake marks we made in the dust that morning, which time had already scrubbed way. "
