02c. 1950 ADI 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. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
04c. 1950 ADAll the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
05c. 1950 ADLook, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
06c. 1950 ADI 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.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
07c. 1950 ADReligion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
08c. 1950 ADMaybe that's what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
09c. 1950 ADIf you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
10c. 1950 AD-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
11c. 1950 ADSo many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
12c. 1950 ADI needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
13c. 1950 ADHer shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
14c. 1950 ADIs that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?Wally Lamb / quote ↗
15c. 1950 ADYour children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
16c. 1950 ADThat time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I'm fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
17c. 1950 ADIf I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
18c. 1950 ADI 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.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
19c. 1950 ADSo maybe that’s what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
20c. 1950 ADHere is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
21c. 1950 ADYou know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?Wally Lamb / quote ↗
22c. 1950 ADAs 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.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
23c. 1950 AD[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.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
24c. 1950 ADPeople walk in the door because they need you to take care of them -- to feed them or fix them.Wally Lamb / quote ↗
