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Wally Lamb QUOTES

Wally Lamb QUOTES

81 " She preferred to get high on life. "

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone

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

― Wally Lamb , The Hour I First Believed

83 " 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. "

― Wally Lamb , I Know This Much Is True

84 " Sarcasm is a suit of armor. "

― Wally Lamb , The Hour I First Believed

85 " It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave?

You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability. "

― Wally Lamb , The Hour I First Believed

86 " 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. "

― Wally Lamb , Couldn't Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution

87 " 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 , We Are Water

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

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone

89 " 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 , She's Come Undone

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

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone

91 " 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. "

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone

92 " The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. "

― Wally Lamb , I Know This Much Is True

93 " a life we didn't choose, chose us "

― Wally Lamb , We Are Water

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

― Wally Lamb , The Hour I First Believed

95 " 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. "

― Wally Lamb , I Know This Much Is True

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

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone

97 " 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. "

― Wally Lamb

98 " what are out stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears? "

― Wally Lamb , I Know This Much Is True

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

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone

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

― Wally Lamb , She's Come Undone