Arcadia Lauren Groff Quotes

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.

He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.

Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it.

They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb. It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.

Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.

Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.

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

They can wound, stories, they can blister.

Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.

And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he'd had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.

No words could possibly contain all he has to say. He manages to utter, at last, I'm okay, and this is enough for now.

Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.

...because when you've had a good enough Teacher, you're all your own Leaders.

He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.

If he cannot be infinite - his lov emeeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadows - this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.

He can only bear tragedy if it's abstract.

The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair.

The 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...

His 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.

If he cannot be infinite - his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow - this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night. Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.

The only thing I wanted, she says, was not to be a burden. Quick and painless, how I wanted to go. But the Universe called you back, Astrid says. For no reason, Hannah says. You find the reason, Astrid snaps. Finish with the self-pity, and move on.

Bit believes the treats' chemical afterburn is what the world beyond Arcadia must taste like.

You only have so many days in your life to try to be happy.

...when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.

...his push for happiness was out of sync with the world's; his ambition was for safety, security, a life of enough food and shelter and money, books and love, the luxury of pursuing the truth by art.

The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing.

I'm fine. I'm fine, he says, and fine, fine repeats in his head as he escapes back into the chill. Around him, a spin of bodies in dark coats, tapping thumbs on pads, pressing phones to heads, settling buds into ear canals, projecting an invisible shield of music as they move through the crowd, digital companionship warmer than the bodies around them. Every soul on the street is sunk within its body. Sometimes Bit imagines that he, alone, bears witness to the world.

Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath. He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.

It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection.

It isn’t important if the story was ever true. Bit manipulates images: he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital.

It brushes him, the good feeling that he is sitting in a fold of time.

He fights sleep to think about it all.

There is, Bit knows, what happens on the surface, and there is what pulls beneath.

Inside my ear a bed she laid. And there she slept. And all became her sleep,

The teeth of the comb are so gentle on his scalp, it feels like crying.

She did too have the fire wings, he whispers, his voice full of sleep. Also she had hair of fire, Bit. And also a head full of fire, too.

This I also promise you, she says, and Astrid’s face is kind as a field of dandelions.

. the countries were like little boys standing in a pool of kerosene, bragging about how many matches they have in their hands . . .

a bird is caught in a net made of air.

There is the swimming feeling in Bit, to be read as casually as a paragraph.

There is a swimming feeling in Bit, to be read as casually as a paragraph.

They were your friends, Bit says. Friends, Hannah says. What a word.

Ghost detainee: a person taken into detention anonymously so their families don’t know what has happened.

They are not nothing, the memories.

He will wait for the hushed spaces in life,

The night draws into morning. Here they are forever, sitting at their tables, separate, alone.

The desert’s broad heavens, full of vultures, were sucking her dry.

The way the darkness moves like a creature in the night woods.

Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.)

God, says Handy, or the Eternal Spark, is in every human heart, in every piece of this earth. In this rock, in this ice, in this plant, this bird. All deserve our gentleness. The

Why has nobody ever told him that the man in the moon is shouting in alarm?

Itadakimasu, I take this nourishment in gratitude to all beings;

The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations’ lies.

...he knows stories don't need to be factual to be vital.

The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath.

And this country has lost what has made it magic, of course. The exuberance, you know. Things, I am afraid, are soon to fall apart. The center cannot hold, all that.

Oh, no, I am dying, Ilya says. Not sick. I am born dying. But I am not so unusual. There are many like me in the world.

You're a lot like Grumpy, you know, she says. You always have to take care of everyone else, and don't let anyone take care of you. It's kind of aggressive.

The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages.

He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.

...she says, Even when you think you can't bear it, you can bear it. He doesn't say anything. Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are.

Bit remembers what Titus used to call his own spells of sadness: the old black dog. How appropriate: fanged and servile, neither wild nor human, but an odd by-product of civilization, hungry and slinking near.

Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, he quotes, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Even when you think you can’t bear it, you can bear it. He doesn’t say anything. Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles, she says. Believe me. I have been where you are. This is something I do know. In

Amenable Bit, good-hearted Bit, gentle and generous Bit. He hates that man. Wishes he’d had any kind of backbone, the guts to say No. If he had, she would still be here. If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.

He closes his eyes to keep the daydream in. Fervently, he bargains. It doesn’t have to be as perfect as it had been in the brief pulse of a vision. He knows that a longing for perfection is the hole in the dam that can let everything pour out.

And then the worry returns as she bites his lips to keep him from groaning: entering him as if from the depth of her mouth come the warring feelings, a ghost in either ear, that what she is doing to him just now is either a deep kindness or a deeper curse.

Bit only wants to be alone. He pushes off into the dark of the forest to find a warm spot of dirt under a tree to curl up in. He wants the hold of the woods on him, the animals to crawl over him, he wants to sink into the roots of the trees and become the earth.

In the long draw of last light across the Eatery, as the tables around them are scrubbed with white vinegar and only they are left in their island of four, flicking the bottle cap from one to another in silence, he is grateful, again, for the infinite generosity of boys.

He’d muttered to Hannah that he was building her a sculpture out in the sunflowers. She was his Muse, he said. For a moment, through Simon’s gaze on Hannah, her motherness fell away, and Bit saw her as lush and attractive as she must be to men, with her long golden braids and roundness and the warmth in her large eyes.

For a few breaths he forgets himself in the swim of nature around him. Its rhythm is so different from Bit’s human own, both more nervous and more patient. He sees a bug that is smaller than a period on a page. He sees the sky, bigger than all that’s in his head. An overwhelm from two directions, vast and tiny, together.

The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath. He takes photo after photo with his ruined film, to hold them there. This is what, long ago, made him fall in love with photography: the paying of attention, the capturing of time. He’d forgotten exactly this.

He finds the smallest story. His finger runs under each word as he puzzles it out. It is about a mother with many children in a time of famine, something Bit knows: the terror in the belly, winterberry and soybeans all they have left in the mason jars. The mother wants to eat her children. They are angelic and choose to die for her. But she is so ashamed with their sacrifice that she doesn’t eat them. Instead, she runs away.

Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of.

and he finds that the disease has tiptoed backward. Quarantine is over: three quarters of a million dead, only thirty thousand in the United States. Most deaths have been contained in a few areas, the city mostly. The president praises technology, the ability to track the disease and make decisions; he comes onto the e-reader, blue thumbprints under his eyes, and says, Without technology, the pandemic would have been a disaster of proportions never before seen on this planet. We must be grateful.

Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato's caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is a war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he has heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations' lies. There are bombs among the stars and murders in the inner cities, red rain over London, there are kidnappers and slaves even now, even in America.

They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or a bomb. It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won’t, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won’t let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.

He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk's tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.