Top 120 Wally Lamb Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be smart enough to know the difference.”

— Wally Lamb

2. “I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.”

— Wally Lamb

3. “Only there’s two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.”

— Wally Lamb

4. “The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

6. “The greatest griefs are silent.”

— Wally Lamb

7. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”

— Wally Lamb

8. “Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.”

— Wally Lamb

9. “The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.”

— Wally Lamb

10. “Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That.”

— Wally Lamb

11. “With destruction comes renovation.”

— Wally Lamb

12. “Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.”

— Wally Lamb

13. “Idle women are always ready to mind other people’s business.”

— Wally Lamb

14. “Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.”

— Wally Lamb

15. “A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.”

— Wally Lamb

16. “Its the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others.”

— Wally Lamb

17. “Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.”

— Wally Lamb

18. “Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.”

— Wally Lamb

19. “Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.”

— Wally Lamb

20. “People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely.”

— Wally Lamb

21. “But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”

— Wally Lamb

22. “Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

24. “I ask you for the time of day, you tell me how to build a clock!”

— Wally Lamb

25. “Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.”

— Wally Lamb

26. “The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.”

— Wally Lamb

27. “People waste their happiness – that’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

29. “Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.”

— Wally Lamb

30. “I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway.”

— Wally Lamb

31. “Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you – you don’t want to do this yourself.”

— Wally Lamb

32. “I thought about how love was always the thing that did that – smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.”

— Wally Lamb

33. “The roundness of life’s design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.”

— Wally Lamb

34. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

35. “The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. Perhaps, Dominick, you have yet to emerge fully from the pond where you swam that morning so long ago. And perhaps, when you do, you will no longer look into the water and see the reflection of a son of a bithc.”

— Wally Lamb

36. “Do you know much about Hindu beliefs, Mr. Birdsey?” she asked. “Shiva is the third god of the Supreme Spirit. The Hindu trinity. Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu is the Preserver, and Shiva is the Destroyer.”

— Wally Lamb

37. “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. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.”

— Wally Lamb

38. “This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.”

— Wally Lamb

39. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

41. “Shiva represents the reproductive power of destruction. The power of renovation. Which is why he’s here in this room, where we dismantle and rebuild.”

— Wally Lamb

42. “Maybe 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

43. “That’s the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn’t it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.”

— Wally Lamb

44. “The whole world was crazy; I’d flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.”

— Wally Lamb

45. “First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman’s book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star!”

— Wally Lamb

46. “I love the most the students with troubled lives.”

— Wally Lamb

47. “It is the firstborn’s burden to unravel the knots that younger brothers make.”

— Wally Lamb

48. “I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.”

— Wally Lamb

49. “All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn’t protect you from the truth.”

— Wally Lamb

50. “He’s splitting me open, I thought. He’ll break me and then I’ll die.”

— Wally Lamb