Wally Lamb Quotes (50 Quotes)

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

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.

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

She preferred to get high on life.

With destruction comes renovation.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

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

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

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

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

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

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

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.

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

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

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

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

I didn't know any schizophrenics. The most valuable information I got was from people with the disease and their family members.

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

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

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

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.