Quotes from Wally Lamb

Love stories are probably all Ive ever been able to write or want to write.

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?

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.

that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

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.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

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.

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...

Who gets the change? the clerk asked. You or...your fella? Oh, he's not my boyfriend, I said. He's my mother.

If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.

If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Fuck you, I said. Uh-oh. There's that angry word.

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.

High School is like a sickness, but trust me, soon the fever breaks and you get over it. ~She's Come Undone

You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.

She preferred to get high on life.

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

sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.