Quotes from Wally Lamb

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

Once you left Easterly, you saw the world was full of these people: ticket sellers, snack bar clerks. They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routines.

That's the problem with survival of the fittest ... the corpse at your fett. That little inconvenience.

Your mother mentioned she had a little girl. These are for you, sweetheart. Just a little something, heh heh. He handed me a wrinkled paper bag with a grease spot on it. I hate it when you could hear a person's saliva right in their laugh.

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.

Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That's when I seen that she has freckles.

So maybe that's what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.

As anxious and limited as that love might have been, it had been love nonetheless.

comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable:

Being in your mid-thirties brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.

I pulled my hand away. It felt numb and oversized, a paw.

Il destino mischia le carte, ma siamo noi a giocare la partita. Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game.

The hair on your head affects people and is a testament to the world about who you are. - Bonnie Foreshaw (Tabatha Rowley's story)

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," I repeated. "But never as much as I have been sinned against!

We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.

am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, 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.

Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.

Faith doesn't give warranties.

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

He said he wanted a Happy Meal.

Because what good's confession without penance—right

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, 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.

Idle women are always ready to mind other people's business.