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Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

Lauren Groff

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Eras
Intense
Historical
Periods
Broken
Times
Cyclical
Everything
Idealism
Cynicism

More quotes by Lauren Groff

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Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.
Lauren Groff
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Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.
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When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
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Childhood is such a delicate tissue what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
Lauren Groff
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You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though.
Lauren Groff
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As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.
Lauren Groff
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Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in.
Lauren Groff
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I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.
Lauren Groff
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It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.
Lauren Groff
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At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
Lauren Groff
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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 they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
Lauren Groff
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Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.
Lauren Groff
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Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Lauren Groff
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My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
Lauren Groff
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Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is the creative fact the fertile fact the fact that suggests and engenders, as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.
Lauren Groff
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I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.
Lauren Groff
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The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.
Lauren Groff
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Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.
Lauren Groff
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It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.
Lauren Groff
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I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
Lauren Groff