Quotes from Wally Lamb

Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet the way I did

I didn't like having Grandma there. She slept on a cot in my room and boiled all our suppers. It was unsanitary, she said, the way Daddy drank right out of the water bottle and then put it back in the Frigidaire.

If it was true that the meek were going to inherit the earth, then Ma was going to be a Rockefeller.

Jack kept refilling my mother's glass with the wine she'd brought. With each sip, she acted more and more like Marilyn Monroe. Grandma was so taken with her special meal, she seemed hardly to notice Ma's behavior. She even reluctantly accepted a glass of wine herself, and went so far as to wet her lips at the rim.

another thing, Leo talking about abstinence is like Donald Trump talking about altruism.

That night I lay in bed with the evening's images spinning before me. I felt energized, as if electrical current were passing through me. Sleep was impossible, I told myself, then dozed, lulled by all the answers to the question of why I was so sad.

I spent the remainder of the visit staring stupidly at the TV, answering Grandma's questions in single syllables and making faces at her cooking.

Ask any of us cynical bastards. to lift up our shirt, and we'll show you where we got shot in the heart.

Without the pictures seducing you, TV was just a powerless talking ghost.

On Friday Ma came timidly out to the pool wearing her beach robe. In her hands she held her equipment: cup of tea, cigarettes, nasal spray. She struggled with the gate, walked up to the water, and dunked her big toe. "Cold," she said.

The biggest bigots were the ones who felt most directly threatened by the underclass. The ones who felt the most moved in on.

What are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

function of art? What is its value? Is it about form and composition? Uniqueness of vision? The relationship between the painter and the painting? The painting and the viewer?

One of two things was happening. Either Merton College had folded over the summer and been too cheap to spend a stamp to tell me, or the other girls had seen me struggling up the long flight of steps and locked the door.

he'd just recently relocated in Connecticut after twenty three years out in Saginaw, Michigan. Great Lakes country. God's country.

I wasn't crazy about this idea, but it seemed less complicated than suicide. All I'd have to do was sit in the dark and breathe.

The truth, as I saw it, was that Daddy wouldn't have left if she hadn't always been Miss Doom and Gloom. "Pretty?" she said. "Really?" "Yeah, pretty ugly." Her lip shook. She reached for her spray. "God, I was only kidding," I said. "Can't you even take a joke?

Your children are not your children,'" he said. "'They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile—fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise's. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she'd be alive. Things would be normal. "You're normal!" she'd said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.

I think . . . the secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes.

Life is a river, she repeated. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the same day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past--connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experimentally.

Do you know much about Hindu beliefs, Mr. Birdsey?" she asked. "Shiva is the third god of the Supreme Spirit. The Hindu trinity. Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu is the Preserver, and Shiva is the Destroyer.

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place.

I wrapped my arms around my chest. I'd read somewhere that that was an instinct left over from caveman days: protect your heart.