Top 100 Wally Lamb Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Wally Lamb

#1. Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy. I had heard her say that before; we were in reruns.

#2. Guess what?' I said. 'I have a psychic.'
His head tilted questioningly, birdlike.
A sidekick?

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. why would white dudes want to change things when they held all the cards?

Wally Lamb

#8. I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Wally Lamb

#9. I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.

Wally Lamb

#10. Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

Wally Lamb

#11. He said he wanted a Happy Meal.

Wally Lamb

#12. Rosalie sat sideways in her chair, shaking from the laughter she was swallowing. I imagined myself drawing a gun from desk, taking aim, and killing her without so much as a quiver.

Wally Lamb

#13. If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

Wally Lamb

#14. 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

#15. Faith doesn't give warranties.

Wally Lamb

#16. Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.

Wally Lamb

#17. 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

#18. Its the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others.

Wally Lamb

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," I repeated. "But never as much as I have been sinned against!

Wally Lamb

#22. I pulled my hand away. It felt numb and oversized, a paw.

Wally Lamb

#23. You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?

Wally Lamb

#24.
that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

Wally Lamb

#25. 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

#26. He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.

Wally Lamb

#27. Visualize your solutions. Picture an answer to the problem. Then make the picture real.

Wally Lamb

#28. 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

#29. He's splitting me open, I thought. He'll break me and then I'll die.

Wally Lamb

#30. 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

#31. Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Wally Lamb

#32. my sympathy. And my gratitude." "Your gratitude? For what?" "For sharing that information with me. I know you are a private person, Mr. Birdsey. Thank you for trusting me.

Wally Lamb

#33. 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

#34. Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

Wally Lamb

#35. 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

#36. That's the problem with survival of the fittest ... the corpse at your fett. That little inconvenience.

Wally Lamb

#37. That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.

Wally Lamb

#38. I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.

Wally Lamb

#39. Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

Wally Lamb

#40. He who goes questing for what he wants may discover, along the way, what he needs.

Wally Lamb

#41. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.

Wally Lamb

#42. All I'm saying, Dad, is that I accept that I don't know. But I have faith that my Lord and Savior does, so I'm putting myself in His hands. Humbling myself to a wisdom that's above and beyond me and praying for His guidance.

Wally Lamb

#43. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E.L. Doctorow

#44. 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

#45. Cucinala come vuoi, ma sempre cocuzza el...Cook squash anyway you like, but it's still squash.

Wally Lamb

#46. Father's command is a son's law!

Wally Lamb

#47. That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.

Wally Lamb

#48. What 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.

Wally Lamb

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. And would you three like peanuts, pretzels, or Biscoff cookies with those?

Wally Lamb

#52. Fuck you, I said."
Uh-oh. There's that angry word.

Wally Lamb

#53. The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

Wally Lamb

#54. What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

Wally Lamb

#55. A life I didn't choose chose me.

Wally Lamb

#56. What if I don't like adventure?
Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That's how you grow.

Wally Lamb

#57. Sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.

Wally Lamb

#58. 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

#59. I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you ... happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit. -Thayer

Wally Lamb

#60. 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

#61. If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?

Wally Lamb

#62. "I love you" was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them

Wally Lamb

#63. The world is made of stairs; some go up and some go down. . . .

Wally Lamb

#64. Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

Wally Lamb

#65. 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

#66. That coincidence is God's way of staying invisible?

Wally Lamb

#67. I love the most the students with troubled lives.

Wally Lamb

#68. 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

#69. We'd all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time.

Wally Lamb

#70. I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

Wally Lamb

#71. 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

#72. A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

Wally Lamb

#73. If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Wally Lamb

#74. Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.

Wally Lamb

#75. I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

Wally Lamb

#76. We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.

Wally Lamb

#77. 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

#78. The greatest griefs are silent.

Wally Lamb

#79. You think it's worth it? That we're over there for the right reasons?"

He shrugged. "Politics is a luxury you can't necessarily afford when you're over there. You just get up, do your job, and embrace the suck.

Wally Lamb

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.

Wally Lamb

#83. Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That

Wally Lamb

#84. Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

Wally Lamb

#85. 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

#86. She preferred to get high on life.

Wally Lamb

#87. She's got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.

Wally Lamb

#88. I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures - old, repeated stories.

Wally Lamb

#89. The "what-ifs": they'll do a number on you.

Wally Lamb

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely.

Wally Lamb

#93. 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