Quotes by Wally Lamb

Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my familys, and my countrys 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, Ive figured out. I know this much is true.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldnt protect you from the truth.

People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. “…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…” 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 sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. “The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That 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.” “I know what you mean,” I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.” “I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. “I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

Look, dont just stare at the pages, I used to tell my students. Become the characters. Live inside the book.

I 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. Theres nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Religions just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

Maybe thats what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

So many bad things have happened to them that they cant trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

I 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.

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

Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when theyre away? To come home and keep you safe?

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of lifes longing for itself.

That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, Im fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness - thats what makes me sad. Everyones so scared to be happy.

If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent nights sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minutes worth of peace.

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.

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