Quotes from Wally Lamb

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference

For a role model, I used Juliet's old nurse in Romeo and Juliet: a good-hearted fussbudget, a woman who spoke her piece but knew her place.

Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates.

She'd been neither a saint nor a whore, but a fallible, sexual woman.

If there was a nuclear holocaust, there'd probably be two surviving life forms: cockroaches and Cher.

Look back on the past but don't stare

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other." "Like Van Gogh.

The wall decorations were dusty metal lobsters and faded pictures of ships. The bedspread had cigarette burns. Inside the nightstand drawer were a complimentary pen and three postcards. "Vacation Dreams Begin at the Coastal Dreams Motel." I went out to the machine and got a soda. The sun was going down; the sky was orange and pink.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way, I told myself. I bet she's had a very hard life.

He was as kind and slow with me as he'd been that first summer and I pushed away all my anger and hurt and distrust because he owed me love.

Life's absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining. Bam! I got into it.

simple women make the best wives.

Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future.

The other day I was looking for something in the bedroom closet and got an unexpected whiff of him from one of his sweaters . . ." His face crumpled up but he fought off crying. "The pain is almost physical, sometimes. I missed him so much that day that it gave me a bloody nose—just started bleeding for no reason. Hadn't

What if I don't like adventure?" I said. Ruth dragged over a kitchen chair and sat down facing me. "Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That's how you grow.

there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.

thought about how love was always the thing that did that—smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt. .

If I reach far back, I can see my father waving to my mother and me and climbing down from his ladder, spray gun in hand, as we arrive with his lunch in our turquoise-and-white car. Daddy reaches the ground and pulls off his face mask.

We lunch in the grass. My father eats sandwiches stuffed with smelly foods Ma and I refuse to eat: liverwurst, vinegar peppers, Limburger cheese. He drinks hot coffee right from the thermos and his Adam's apple moves up and down when he swallows.

What solitary child hasn't wished for a twin, Mr. Birdsey? Hasn't imagined that a double exists somewhere in the world? It's a hungering for human connection— another way of sheltering oneself against the storm.

Old. I'm almost forty, probably as close now to Mrs. Masicotte's age as I am to the age of my parents as they sat on that lawn, laughing and blowing dandelion puffs at me, smoking their shared Pall Mall cigarettes and thinking Mrs. Masicotte was the answer to their future—that that black-and-white Emerson television set was a gift free and clear of the strings that would begin our family's unraveling.

busting his agates

I got on my bike and drove, fast and recklessly. The humid air pushed thick against my face; if a child had walked in front of my path, I might have killed it. I sped past Jeanette's street and past the Treetop Acres sign and onto Route 118. I squeezed the rubber handlebar caps, squeezed the shaking out of myself. I hated both of them. The harder I pedaled—the more I risked—the better it felt.

Stop it! My whole life still hurts!