Quotes from Wally Lamb

At dusk each evening, Mrs. Tingley, Grandma's third-floor tenant, clip-clopped down the side steps with her bug-eyed Chihuahua, Cutie Pie. "Come on, Cutie Pie, go poopy

If you squinted while looking at her from across a room, you would swear Mrs. Nord was Jackie Kennedy. My own mother sat alone on Bobolink Drive all day, talking to her parakeet, Petey, and worrying about dead children. Around the time of our move to Bobolink Drive, I stopped kissing my mother on the lips. It had been over four years since she'd lost the baby.

This was a career, not an emotional disorder.

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.

You are limited, my friend, in what you can and cannot control, as are we all. If you are to become healthy, you must acknowledge the ineluctability of your brother's course. Acknowledge your limitations in directing it, Dominick. And that will free you. That will help to make you well.

The oven was thick with grease.

You think it's worth it? That we're over there for the right reasons? He shrugged. Politics is a luxury you can't necessarily afford when you're over there. You just get up, do your job, and embrace the suck.

It's just a coincidence, I guess, but just the day before at the dry cleaner's, one of our customers, Mrs. Chudy, said to me- I forget what we were even talking about, but she said, My dear, there are no coincidences. That's just God's way of remaining anonymous. And I was like, to myself not to her, yeah? How do you know? But hey, maybe she's right.

If Pierre buys a horse for two hundred francs and Jacques buys a mule for a hundred and forty, and the two enter into a partnership and decide to trade their creatures for a piece of land that costs four hundred and eighty francs, then how long will it take a lame Frenchman to borrow a silk umbrella?

Joined together, they made a kind of centaur—half bastard, half bitch. Dottie would have laughed out loud at that.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That

It had occurred to me that Jack and I would be starting out of the house at the same time each morning and that St. Anthony's School was on his way to work. From that, I had perfected my fantasy: I would arrive in the MG amidst the confusion of buses, share a private laugh with Jack, then swing the door open to my newfound popularity. My hair would have come out as sleek and straight as Marianne Faithfull's. By lunchtime, I'd be class president.

She shooed away the kiss, a distraction. "Grouchie Gertie," she said, softly. "I'd forgotten that.

Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.

The secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes... Instead of... always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

It's a free country," I said. "Granny babes." That night up in my room I pulled Ma's flying leg out from behind the dresser and saw, for the first time, that it was beautiful. I hung it above my bed.

But painting houses wasn't unsatisfying work. You had your good karma jobs, your decent clients. It felt pretty good when you drove away on that last day, paid in full, having restored a little color to someone's shit-brown life.

If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.

I ask you for the time of day, you tell me how to build a clock!

If a book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

If I talked, I might cry.

Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops and tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. .

My vision blurred over with tears.

Cucinala come vuoi, ma sempre cocuzza el...Cook squash anyway you like, but it's still squash.