Wally Lamb quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Wally Lamb on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them.

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

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

Who gets the change?" the clerk asked. "You or ... your fella?"
Oh, he's not my boyfriend," I said. "He's my mother.

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

It is the firstborn's burden to unravel the knots that younger brothers make.

Well, get used to it, the whole world is nuts.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I was a kid ... I needed to belong.

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

As anxious and limited as that love might have been, it had been love nonetheless.

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

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

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

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

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

He said he wanted a Happy Meal.

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

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

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

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

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

My memory of that day is like television itself, sharp and clear but unreliable.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?

Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful.

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

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

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

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

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

Faith doesn't give warranties.

Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.

A purple African violet so lush and fleshy it looked edible ... his fingers as cool and smooth as beach stones.

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

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.

The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.

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.

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

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.

The greatest griefs are silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

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.

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

I ask you for the time of day, you tell me how to build a clock!

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.

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

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

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

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

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.

Father's command is a son's law!

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

He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.

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

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

She preferred to get high on life.

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

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

So maybe that's what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.

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

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

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