Best Wally Lamb Quotes & Sayings

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

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

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

Just don't ever let it happen to you, Dolores. Let people just shit all over you. Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet that way I did. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we convince ourselves that it is true. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

Audry Hepburn on the cover of The Nun's Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened.
"What are you looking at?" I said. "Fuck you." It was the first time I'd ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power.
Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow. — Wally Lamb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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