Wally Lamb

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

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

“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.”

“With destruction comes renovation.”

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

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

“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. ”

“what are out stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”

“The irony," he said,"...is that now that I'm this blind man, it's clearer to me now than it's ever been before. What that line? 'Was blind but now I see...”

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

“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.”

“Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Eventually, I reached the other side of the chasm and understood the differences between the two men. I no longer hated Daddy: he had been a shitty father and a shitty husband - a man who's made two bad choices based on lust and coveting and then been too weak either to live with them or undo them. But he had not been a rapist.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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)”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So I got my stuff and the girl at the register puts these other things in my bag, too. Little free samples: gum and a comb and a marker pen. So I says to her, 'Look, girlie, I got false teeth and I wear a wig.' So she fishes back in my bag and takes out the comb and the gum. Left the pen in there. Anyways, I went back to the van, even though I knew it was locked. Figured I'd just wait and have a smoke. You can't smoke in the van, see? So while I'm waiting there, minding my own business, this car pulls into the handicapped space right next to us--brand-new car, white and clean, and it's got this bumper sticker on it that says, 'Life Is a Shit Sandwich.' Isn't that stupid? So this guy gets out--good-lookin' fella, in his twenties. I say to him, 'Hey, handsome, tell me something.' He takes a look at my walker and gets all panicky. 'I'm just running in for two seconds,' he says. See, he thinks I'm going to yell at him for parking in a handicapped space, but I ain't. I don't give a rat's ass about that, you see. I'd rather walk the extra ten feet than be called handicapped. Where was I?'She amazed me. 'Life's a shit sandwich,' I said.'Oh, yeah. Right. So that guy goes runnin' into the store and here's what I did. I fished that free pen out of the bag and marched right over there to that bumper of his. Got myself right down on the ground--and I wrote--just after the 'Life's a shit sandwich' part--I wrote, 'But only if you're a shithead.' 'Course, then I couldn't get myself back up again--had to yell over to a couple of kids at the phone booth to come pick me back up.”

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

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

“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.”

“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”

“I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.”

“If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.”

“Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.”

“He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.”

“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”

“-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.”

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

“Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.”

“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.”

“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 started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

“Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.”

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