Wally Lamb Quotes

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.

Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.

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.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.

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

This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.

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.

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

Your twin brother is, as you said, an abandoned house. If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.

If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laugher, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry ... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?

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.

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

a life we didn't choose, chose us

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

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.

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.

I'm glad you're seeing someone," she said. "You and Thomas had a pretty complex relationship. You've spent an enormous amount of emotional energy on Thomas. Your whole life. Now, you're going to have to take all of that energy and . . . reinvest it, I guess. It's bound to be a complicated process.

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died ... They're with me still. They're here ...

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.

[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.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

... you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like what did I think of Kanye West's music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn't just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, 'Stop it! Act your age!' ... I didn't do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn't. 'Honor thy father,' you know what I'm saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you're stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he's younger than you are.

There was no shorthand for "I'm sorry." You were obliged to speak those two words.

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

This was a career, not an emotional disorder.

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.

Comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable:

For all I know God may be nothing more or nothing less than the sound of the moving water outside your window.

La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorsol... The tongue has no bones but can break a man's back!

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

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I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, 'Wake up!

Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.

You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.

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.

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

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

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.

When Lary called to say that the story would be published, I was so elated that I picked up my son, now a toddler, and tossed him so far into the air that his head hit the kitchen ceiling. Luckily, it was one of those drop ceilings with the foam-backed pads, so Jared didn't hurt his head. It just disappeared for a second and then came back into view.

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.

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

But painting houses wasn't unsatisfying work. You had your good karma jobs, your decent clients. It felt pretty good when you drove away on that last day, paid in full, having restored a little color to someone's shit-brown life.

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

One thing I've learned in my program is that guilt is a wasted emotion, you know? Look back on the past but don't stare.

She paused, cleared her throat twice, and I suddenly realized she was crying. If you want to love someone, then go right ahead. I know what love feel like; you didn't invent love. But the Lord Almighty doesn't give out promises just because you love someone. Love only gets you so far.

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

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.

Faith doesn't give warranties.

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

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.

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.

The hair on your head affects people and is a testament to the world about who you are.
- Bonnie Foreshaw (Tabatha Rowley's story)

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

AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl.

I learned that there are two young men lost in the woods. Not one. Two ... I may never find one of the young men ... He has been gone so long. The odds, I'm afraid may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.

I understand there was some controversy about the coroner's ruling concerning Josephus Jones's

Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

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.

Mine is a story of craving.
Each memory makes me a child again.

Your mother mentioned she had a little girl. These are for you, sweetheart. Just a little something, heh heh."
He handed me a wrinkled paper bag with a grease spot on it. I hate it when you could hear a person's saliva right in their laugh.

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.

If Pierre buys a horse for two hundred francs and Jacques buys a mule for a hundred and forty, and the two enter into a partnership and decide to trade their creatures for a piece of land that costs four hundred and eighty francs, then how long will it take a lame Frenchman to borrow a silk umbrella?

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

That's what movies are, right? Thousands of still pictures taken months or years or decades before - streams of images burned onto celluloid that are reeled in front of a lamp and projected onto a screen, allowing us the illusion that they're alive. Flickers of light and dark. Brightness and shadow that won't stand still - like life itself.

It was a matter of perspective, I began to see.
The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.
Dolores Price

When you're the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands
the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper
if you've promised your dying mother
then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin
the guy who beat the biochemical rap.

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.

I'm not supposed to need fixing; I'm the strong one - the lookout.

You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.

Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

God, that's always the thing you have to decide with high school kids: what to make an issue of, what to let go.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

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.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?

Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.

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

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.

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.

You orchestrate happiness, Dolores - you work at it. You don't catch it as it hurls toward you like a football

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

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.

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

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

That was the big joke, wasn't it? The answer to the riddle: There was no one up there in Heaven, making sure the accounts came out right. I'd solved it, hadn't I? Cracked the code? It was all just a joke. The god inside my brother's head was just his disease. My mother had knelt every night and prayed to her own steepled hands. Your baby died because of ... because of no particular reason at all. Your wife left you because you sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so you pretended she was the one in bed with you while you screwed your girlfriend and her boyfriend hid in the closet, watching.

So, you are not so much interested in exploring your feelings about Joy's betrayal. Or the failure of your relationship. You are merely giving me a tour of the museum.'
'The museum? ... I don't follow you.'
'Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.'
'I, uh ... '
'We all superintend such a place, I suppose,' she said, 'although some of us are more painstaking curators than others. That is the category in which I would certainly put you, Dominick. You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you.

Joined together, they made a kind of centaur - half bastard, half bitch. Dottie would have laughed out loud at that.

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.

Don't misunderstand me, my friend. I'm neither condoning nor validating your mother's decision. I certainly agree that you had every right to know who your father was. I'm merely trying to present an alternate theory as to how she may have been thinking. Why she might have kept the knowledge from you.