Wally Lamb Quotes & Sayings

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. — Wally Lamb

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

The World is a very old place, so you'll never be able to tell a completely original story — 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

What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war. — Wally Lamb

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. — Wally Lamb

Father's command is a son's law! — Wally Lamb

That's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. (p. 717) — Wally Lamb

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow. — Wally Lamb

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

This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken. — Wally Lamb

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

The world is made of stairs; some go up and some go down. . . . — Wally Lamb

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words. — 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

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

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. — Wally Lamb

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

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

You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course. — Wally Lamb

We'd all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

The greatest griefs are silent. — Wally Lamb

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. — 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

Our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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. — Wally Lamb

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," I repeated. "But never as much as I have been sinned against! — Wally Lamb

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. — Wally Lamb

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

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 — Wally Lamb

Comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable: — Wally Lamb

That coincidence is God's way of staying invisible? — Wally Lamb

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

With destruction comes renovation. — Wally Lamb

This was a career, not an emotional disorder. — Wally Lamb

And yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people's cruelty toward "the other" - those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them. . . — Wally Lamb

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

And would you three like peanuts, pretzels, or Biscoff cookies with those? — 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

I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium
the devils let loose from their cages. — Wally Lamb

You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

He was right. And he was an insensitive shit. — Wally Lamb

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

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

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said - it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness - this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really - tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too - the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys. — Wally Lamb

People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them
to feed them or fix them. — Wally Lamb

a life we didn't choose, chose us — Wally Lamb

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

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them. — Wally Lamb

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

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

What if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood and risked fatherhood? Offered him a pair of sheltering arms? Would it have been enough to keep him from going down there and doing what he did? What if? What if? What if? ... — Wally Lamb

When I was a kid ... I needed to belong. — Wally Lamb

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat. — Wally Lamb

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

High School is like a sickness, but trust me, soon the fever breaks and you get over it." ~She's Come Undone — Wally Lamb

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

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. — Wally Lamb

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

That's often the case, of course - that creation and madness begin to dance with each other. — Wally Lamb

She preferred to get high on life. — 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

Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M. — 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

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. — Wally Lamb

The key to peace within my soul, he said, was to cast aside my bitterness and resentment. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

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

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness. — Wally Lamb

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

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. — 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

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

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

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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 ... — Wally Lamb

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