Arcadia
Lauren Groff
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating 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.”
“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...”
“In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
trust, beliefs, thought-provoking, goodness, decline, pain, fragility, social-contract, fragmentation, precariousness, delicacy, life, people, poetry, humanity, civilization, world, childhood, decay, laws, rules, trauma
