Wally Lamb

“A life I didn't choose chose me.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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