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Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.

Lauren Groff

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Lauren Groff
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Cooperstown
New York
Men
Community
Lovely
Creepy
People
Everyone
Group
Daughters
Comes
Watching
Sixty
Father
Daughter
Fathers
Makes
Married
Mothers
Mother
Marriage
Aspects
Inducted
Else
Year
Twelve
Strained
Things
Five
Communities
Intentional

More quotes by Lauren Groff

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I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.
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Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights! I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.
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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.
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And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.
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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.
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Parenthood means becoming comfortable with the fact that there are things outside your control, things that end and fail, just as most utopias end and by some measure fail. And just because they're a failure doesn't mean there isn't value there.
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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.
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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.
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As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.
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Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?
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In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations.
Lauren Groff
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The idea of legitimacy is something I suppose I deal with in my fiction, and in part it's probably a response to my upbringing. When I was growing up I was the middle child, pathologically shy, in a family with a very loud and opinionated older brother, and I felt as if I never had the right to speak. As a result, I simply didn't speak very much.
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In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
Lauren Groff
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Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur we choose to love we do not choose to cease loving.
Lauren Groff
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I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.
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Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.
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When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.
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I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.
Lauren Groff
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If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.
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