Quotes from Wally Lamb

Audry Hepburn on the cover of The Nun's Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened. What are you looking at? I said. Fuck you. It was the first time I'd ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power. Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow.

When I asked my parents how the baby got inside Ma, they both laughed, and then Daddy told me they had made it with their bodies. I pictured them fully clothed, rubbing furiously against each other, like two sticks making fire.

My memory of that day is like television itself, sharp and clear but unreliable.

You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place - even if it kills you.

Just don't ever let it happen to you, Dolores. Let people just shit all over you. Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet that way I did.

For a quick moment, I saw Grandma as she saw herself: a decent woman whom God, for unfathomable reasons, had chosen to punish. I almost loved her for her bewilderment. I almost touched her.

Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I've undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love.

This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you were going

It just wasn't for me, and anyway, those people were a lot more far gone than I was. More in my father's league than mine. I just cut back a little. Less beer and liquor, more jogging. I was fine.

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

You orchestrate happiness, Dolores - you work at it. You don't catch it as it hurls toward you like a football

You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?

She paused, cleared her throat twice, and I suddenly realized she was crying. If you want to love someone, then go right ahead. I know what love feel like; you didn't invent love. But the Lord Almighty doesn't give out promises just because you love someone. Love only gets you so far.

there was no shorthand for I'm sorry. You were obliged to speak those two words.

Your twin brother is, as you said, an abandoned house. If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.

I learned that there are two young men lost in the woods. Not one. Two....I may never find one of the young men....He has been gone so long. The odds, I'm afraid may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.

As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.

That's what life's all about Dolores, climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

Visualize your solutions. Picture an answer to the problem. Then make the picture real.

The irony, he said,...is that now that I'm this blind man, it's clearer to me now than it's ever been before. What that line? 'Was blind but now I see...

I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment, he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.

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. Perhaps, Dominick, you have yet to emerge fully from the pond where you swam that morning so long ago. And perhaps, when you do, you will no longer look into the water and see the reflection of a son of a bithc.

A life I didn't choose chose me.

Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.