Quotes from Wally Lamb

If your twin was dead, were you still a twin?

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.

Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.

I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.

Sarcasm is a suit of armor.

It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave? You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.

Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

One thing I've learned in my program is that guilt is a wasted emotion, you know? Look back on the past but don't stare.

She's got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got.

Well, get used to it, the whole world is nuts.

Eventually, I reached the other side of the chasm and understood the differences between the two men. I no longer hated Daddy: he had been a shitty father and a shitty husband - a man who's made two bad choices based on lust and coveting and then been too weak either to live with them or undo them. But he had not been a rapist.

I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation--not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.

a life we didn't choose, chose us

I love you was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them

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

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

Guess what?' I said. 'I have a psychic.' His head tilted questioningly, birdlike. A sidekick?

Rosalie sat sideways in her chair, shaking from the laughter she was swallowing. I imagined myself drawing a gun from desk, taking aim, and killing her without so much as a quiver.

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.

A purple African violet so lush and fleshy it looked edible... his fingers as cool and smooth as beach stones.

The World is a very old place, so you'll never be able to tell a completely original story

You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner.