Quotes from Wally Lamb

So maybe that's what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was. At any rate, I'm glad she doesn't know about the corpse that's down there in that well. I've spared her that much.

This house has been my cross to bear," she was fond of saying. She had come to see her staying on amongst the "riffraff" as the will of God. He had placed her here as a model of clean Catholic living. She was not obliged to speak to any of her neighbors, only to offer them her good example.

Dolores, please!" Grandma stood over my bed, her cheeks pinkened with exasperation. The graduation gown was draped over her arm. "That poor man has driven here specially to deliver this. He's waiting downstairs to see you. What am I supposed to say?" I stared at the TV screen in a counterfeit trance. "Tell that homo to mind his own business," I said.

Mr. Nord, bald and boring, sold equipment to hospitals and was gone a lot on overnight trips. Mrs. Nord wore eye shadow and headbands that matched her shell tops and Bermudas. For lunch she made us foods she'd seen in the pages of her women's magazines: baked hot dogs coated in crushed Special K; English muffin pizzas; Telstar coolers (lemonade and club soda afloat with a toothpick-speared maraschino cherry—a sort of edible satellite that jabbed your lip as you drank).

I'd gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw's office - gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.

That coincidence is God's way of staying invisible?

He who goes questing for what he wants may discover, along the way, what he needs.

What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

to open his eyes. But Dr. Shaw

Atminties t?km? gali nuvesti jus iki suvokimo up?s. O suvokimas savo ruožtu gali b?ti atleidimo up?s intakas.

I'm not supposed to need fixing; I'm the strong one—the lookout.

Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone.

La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorsol... The tongue has no bones but can break a man's back!

I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures - old, repeated stories.

America's been living on borrowed time all these years... Playing the world's whore, wallowing in our greed. Now we're going to pay the price.

It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.

and yet she continues to skip rope in my mind and on my canvases, raising her dark, hopeful face to the sky, innocent of the depth of people's cruelty toward "the other"—those who, for whatever reason, must swim against the tide instead of letting it carry them. . . .

Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you. Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was missing. How lonely that life had been: going to work, going home, and watching TV, going places by myself on weekends.

Domenico!" Father Guglielmo said. "I remind you again that the late monsignor's sins and his salvation are between God and him. Your brother's, too. To wish damnation on one and assign damnation to the other is to presume yourself capable of doing God's work for Him. Humble yourself, man! Pray for humility. If you seek absolution, you must put yourself in a state of grace.

For all I know God may be nothing more or nothing less than the sound of the moving water outside your window.

When a painting I'm working on becomes my singular focus—when I am "in the zone," as I've heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me.

What if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood and risked fatherhood? Offered him a pair of sheltering arms? Would it have been enough to keep him from going down there and doing what he did? What if? What if? What if? ...

So much for 'Give us your tired and hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free