Wally Lamb Quotes

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.
Wally Lamb
When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.
Wally Lamb
Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I've undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love.
Wally Lamb
Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
Wally Lamb
A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.
Wally Lamb
Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!
Wally Lamb
Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.
Wally Lamb
That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.
Wally Lamb
Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be smart enough to know the difference
Wally Lamb
But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?
Wally Lamb
I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
Wally Lamb
You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place - even if it kills you.
Wally Lamb
The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.
Wally Lamb
I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation--not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.
Wally Lamb
We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.
Wally Lamb
Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.
Wally Lamb
What if I don’t like adventure?Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.
Wally Lamb
Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference.
Wally Lamb
A life I didn't choose chose me.
Wally Lamb
Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you." Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was missing. How lonely that life had been: going to work, going home, and watching TV, going places by myself on weekends.
Wally Lamb
People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them -- to feed them or fix them.
Wally Lamb
[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.
Wally Lamb
As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.
Wally Lamb
You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?
Wally Lamb
Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.
Wally Lamb
So maybe that’s what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.
Wally Lamb
I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
Wally Lamb
If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.
Wally Lamb
That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
Wally Lamb
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
Wally Lamb
Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?
Wally Lamb
Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.
Wally Lamb
I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.
Wally Lamb
So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.
Wally Lamb
-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.
Wally Lamb
If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.
Wally Lamb
Maybe that's what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.
Wally Lamb
Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.
Wally Lamb
I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Wally Lamb
Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.
Wally Lamb
People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists.t“…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…”tWhat made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.tI sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me.t“The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.”t“I know what you mean,” I said.tHis eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.”t“I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened.t“I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
Wally Lamb
All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.
Wally Lamb
A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.
Wally Lamb
I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.
Wally Lamb
Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
Wally Lamb