Quotes from Wally Lamb

He reached over and tweaked one of my bumps, then cuffed me on the chin. "You hiding walnuts in there or something?" "Shut up," I said. I jumped in and swam the length of the pool, hiding my smile underwater. He was a flirt, that was all. What was wrong with that? If Mrs. Masicotte was stupid enough to buy us a pool because he flirted a little, that was her problem, not ours.

Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy. I had heard her say that before; we were in reruns.

She suggested that...I should examine what I had been trying to shoot at and punch and kill for so long- whether or not I had, perhaps, denied some more gentle part of my nature, and if so, what had it cost me. And don't get a tattoo for your forehead, she said, smiling. It's entirely unnecessary. As proof, she held her hands in front of her. Wiggled her fingers and smiled. Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she has said; the gods both laughed and wept.

All the time we were there, you could see that dead squirrel right out in plain sight. Whenever anyone mentions New Hampshire, that squirrel is always what I think of. I bet I've thought about that squirrel a million times.

Grandma and I were cautiously polite to each other. "Make yourself at home, Dolores," she said hesitantly as she opened the door to what had once been my mother's bedroom. The room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the hard mattress, it crackled under me.

Grandma turned her TV to thunderous volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an "Edge of Night" fan. Sometimes I'd grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with her, slurping intentionally from the bottle. "I hope you don't sit like that in school," she said. "It's unladylike.

Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions—the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love, you know?

Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game

It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them.

If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.

What had happened was going to be always on me, in me, as permanent as one of Roberta's tattoos. "Dolores," I said. I repeated my name over and over until it sounded warped and unreal. I was never going to be myself again.

Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future.

I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference.

This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken.

From what people who are on Facebook say, it's a colossal waste of time, but what I don't get is why they're always on it anyway. . . .

The new wallpaper looks pretty," she called out to me. The back-door screen made a veil for her face. "What are you doing out there by the ash can?" "Nothing," I told her. Bees were in the grass and the afternoon sun warmed my face and arms. I had just found the mint.

my sympathy. And my gratitude." "Your gratitude? For what?" "For sharing that information with me. I know you are a private person, Mr. Birdsey. Thank you for trusting me.

She usually shooed me out when I caught her naked, but Daddy's anger had left her far away and careless. The ashtray sat on the edge of the tub, filled with stubbed-out Pall Malls; the bathroom was thick with smoke that moved when I moved.

For five minutes, neither of us spoke. I stared ahead and watched the seat upholstery go blurry from my tears.

She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I wasn't a son of a bitch.