Wally Lamb

Quotes by Wally Lamb

• 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.

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• 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?

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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

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• A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

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• 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.

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

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

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• A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

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• 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.

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

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

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

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