Top 100 Wally Lamb Quotes
#1. I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
Wally Lamb
#2. If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.
Wally Lamb
#3. A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.
Wally Lamb
#4. I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.
Wally Lamb
#5. We'd all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time.
Wally Lamb
#6. The hair on your head affects people and is a testament to the world about who you are.
- Bonnie Foreshaw (Tabatha Rowley's story)
Wally Lamb
#7. That coincidence is God's way of staying invisible?
Wally Lamb
#8. What are you asking God for?" I joked. "A million dollars? Two million?" "I'm not asking Him for anything," he said. "I'm thanking Him for good food and wine, good health and famiglia.
Wally Lamb
#9. And would you three like peanuts, pretzels, or Biscoff cookies with those?
Wally Lamb
#10. "I love you" was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them
Wally Lamb
#11. If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?
Wally Lamb
#12. 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
#13. Sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.
Wally Lamb
#14. The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.
Wally Lamb
#15. Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.
Wally Lamb
#17. Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.
Wally Lamb
#18. This was a career, not an emotional disorder.
Wally Lamb
#19. It reminded me that they [the students] were more than just their scholarly shortcomings and gripes about the workload. Each had a history, a set of problems. Each, for better or worse, was anchored to a family.
Wally Lamb
#20. When I asked my parents how the baby got inside Ma, they both laughed, and then Daddy told me they had made it with their bodies. I pictured them fully clothed, rubbing furiously against each other, like two sticks making fire.
Wally Lamb
#21. Blood banged inside my head. I loved my brother. I hated him. There was no solution to who he was. No getting back who he had been.
Wally Lamb
#22. We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.
Wally Lamb
#23. She preferred to get high on life.
Wally Lamb
#24. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love?
Wally Lamb
#25. Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That
Wally Lamb
#26. Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.
Wally Lamb
#27. 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
#28. Of course, three classes is full time, so they'd have to give me the benefits package which would kill them. Screw the adjuncts, right? We're the monks of higher education. How much do you make?
Wally Lamb
#30. You see, everyone thinks they're too good for day-old pastry, like one-third off is charity or something. The world is full of snobs. Snobs and slobs. I ought to write a book.
Wally Lamb
#31. Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.
Wally Lamb
#32. America's been living on borrowed time all these years ... Playing the world's whore, wallowing in our greed. Now we're going to pay the price.
Wally Lamb
#33. Who gets the change?" the clerk asked. "You or ... your fella?"
Oh, he's not my boyfriend," I said. "He's my mother.
Wally Lamb
#34. 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
#35. For a quick moment, I saw Grandma as she saw herself: a decent woman whom God, for unfathomable reasons, had chosen to punish. I almost loved her for her bewilderment. I almost touched her.
Wally Lamb
#36. Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.
Wally Lamb
#37. Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy. I had heard her say that before; we were in reruns.
Wally Lamb
#38. Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.
Wally Lamb
#39. I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.
Wally Lamb
#40. Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.
Wally Lamb
#41. You are limited, my friend, in what you can and cannot control, as are we all. If you are to become healthy, you must acknowledge the ineluctability of your brother's course. Acknowledge your limitations in directing it, Dominick. And that will free you. That will help to make you well.
Wally Lamb
#42. Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That's when I seen that she has freckles.
Wally Lamb
#43. 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
#44. Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.
Wally Lamb
#45. That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.
Wally Lamb
#46. Cucinala come vuoi, ma sempre cocuzza el...Cook squash anyway you like, but it's still squash.
Wally Lamb
#47. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.
Wally Lamb
#48. He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.
Wally Lamb
#49. I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.
Wally Lamb
#50. That's the problem with survival of the fittest ... the corpse at your fett. That little inconvenience.
Wally Lamb
#51. I'd gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw's office - gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.
Wally Lamb
#52. Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.
Wally Lamb
#53. Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.
Wally Lamb
#54. Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.
Wally Lamb
#55. All the time we were there, you could see that dead squirrel right out in plain sight. Whenever anyone mentions New Hampshire, that squirrel is always what I think of. I bet I've thought about that squirrel a million times.
Wally Lamb
#56. Visualize your solutions. Picture an answer to the problem. Then make the picture real.
Wally Lamb
#57. Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.
Wally Lamb
#58. You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.
Wally Lamb
#59. 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
#60. Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference. Viveca comes downstairs first and heads into the
Wally Lamb
#61. This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.
Wally Lamb
#62. I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway.
Wally Lamb
#63. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them
to feed them or fix them.
Wally Lamb
#64. If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.
Wally Lamb
#65. I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment, he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.
Wally Lamb
#66. First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman's book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star!
Wally Lamb
#67. 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
#68. When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street ... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.
Wally Lamb
#69. It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them.
Wally Lamb
#70. Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.
Wally Lamb
#71. When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.
Wally Lamb
#72. When a painting I'm working on becomes my singular focus - when I am "in the zone," as I've heard people put it - a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me.
Wally Lamb
#73. Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.
Wally Lamb
#74. I'm not supposed to need fixing; I'm the strong one - the lookout.
Wally Lamb
#75. My memory of that day is like television itself, sharp and clear but unreliable.
Wally Lamb
#76. The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.
Wally Lamb
#78. I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, 'Wake up!
Wally Lamb
#79. 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
#80. Joined together, they made a kind of centaur - half bastard, half bitch. Dottie would have laughed out loud at that.
Wally Lamb
#81. She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I wasn't a son of a bitch.
Wally Lamb
#82. Comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable:
Wally Lamb
#83. Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.
Wally Lamb
#84. Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
Wally Lamb
#85. Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we convince ourselves that it is true.
Wally Lamb
#86. The key to peace within my soul, he said, was to cast aside my bitterness and resentment.
Wally Lamb
#87. What had happened was going to be always on me, in me, as permanent as one of Roberta's tattoos. "Dolores," I said. I repeated my name over and over until it sounded warped and unreal. I was never going to be myself again.
Wally Lamb
#88. High School is like a sickness, but trust me, soon the fever breaks and you get over it." ~She's Come Undone
Wally Lamb
#89. Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.
Wally Lamb
#90. Because what good's confession without penance - right,
Wally Lamb
#91. There was no shorthand for "I'm sorry." You were obliged to speak those two words.
Wally Lamb
#92. The World is a very old place, so you'll never be able to tell a completely original story
Wally Lamb
#93. It just wasn't for me, and anyway, those people were a lot more far gone than I was. More in my father's league than mine. I just cut back a little. Less beer and liquor, more jogging. I was fine.
Wally Lamb
#94. I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.
Wally Lamb
#95. It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.
Wally Lamb
#96. Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.
Wally Lamb
#97. The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.
Wally Lamb
#98. It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.
Wally Lamb
#99. I think ... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes ... Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.
Wally Lamb
#100. Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.
Wally Lamb
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