01c. 1978 ADDid you?' the producer said. 'He's so clownish on the surface, all joke and dazzle. How in the world could you have seen it?''But I did. The moment I met him," she said. "A fucking supernova. Every day since.' She thought, but did not say, almost.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
02c. 1978 ADMathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees. She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women, such kindness, their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn't know why, but they saw her, and they loved her even still.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
03c. 1978 ADSleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what's important behind.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
04c. 1978 ADIt occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
06c. 1978 ADThere is little that a puppy won't fix, even if the fix is for a short time.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
07c. 1978 ADWe watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
08c. 1978 ADEven still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
09c. 1978 ADAnd this was what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our strong hearts, our long-lost childhoods. Sunshine in a field and crickets and the sweet tealeaf stink of a new ball mitt and a rock glinting with mica and a chaw of bubblegum wrapping its sweet tendrils down our throats and the warm breeze up our shorts and the low vibrato of lake loons and the sun and the sun and the warm sun and this is what we felt; the sun.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
10c. 1978 ADThe stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear...a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...Lauren Groff / quote ↗
11c. 1978 ADHis heart...responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
12c. 1978 ADHe wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
13c. 1978 ADThe balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
14c. 1978 ADThere aren't very many good models of feminine rage - and the ones that we remember are ones where women take that anger internally and implode themselves in a real way, like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary.Lauren Groff / quote ↗
