Top 120 Wally Lamb Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I repeated. “But never as much as I have been sinned against!”

— Wally Lamb

52. “If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.”

— Wally Lamb

53. “I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I’m writing.”

— Wally Lamb

54. “Religion’s just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

56. “Forgiveness is the rich loam from which love can grow.”

— Wally Lamb

57. “So 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

58. “I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.”

— Wally Lamb

59. “Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

62. “I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

64. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

65. “I wasn’t crazy about this idea, but it seemed less complicated than suicide. All I’d have to do was sit in the dark and breathe.”

— Wally Lamb

66. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

67. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

68. “I’m not supposed to need fixing; I’m the strong one – the lookout.”

— Wally Lamb

69. “As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.”

— Wally Lamb

70. “The wall decorations were dusty metal lobsters and faded pictures of ships. The bedspread had cigarette burns. Inside the nightstand drawer were a complimentary pen and three postcards. “Vacation Dreams Begin at the Coastal Dreams Motel.” I went out to the machine and got a soda. The sun was going down; the sky was orange and pink.”

— Wally Lamb

71. “You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner.”

— Wally Lamb

72. “This was a career, not an emotional disorder.”

— Wally Lamb

73. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

74. “I was watching how we’d filled the room with floating smoke, how our slightest movements stirred it. I was back at our old house on Carter Avenue, the night Daddy threw the barbell and Ma soaked herself in the tub, smoking, her brown nipples half in, half out of the water.”

— Wally Lamb

75. “On Friday Ma came timidly out to the pool wearing her beach robe. In her hands she held her equipment: cup of tea, cigarettes, nasal spray. She struggled with the gate, walked up to the water, and dunked her big toe. “Cold,” she said.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

77. “When Lary called to say that the story would be published, I was so elated that I picked up my son, now a toddler, and tossed him so far into the air that his head hit the kitchen ceiling. Luckily, it was one of those drop ceilings with the foam-backed pads, so Jared didn’t hurt his head. It just disappeared for a second and then came back into view.”

— Wally Lamb

78. “Grandma traded at Connie’s because she had never learned to drive a car, but she held a grudge against Big Boy, who had said to her one day in front of a whole storeful of customers, “What’ll it be, tootsie?” When I moved in, she was only too happy to make me her errand girl. Daily, she folded money into my palm and sent me down the street for Tums or cornstarch or prune juice. As I headed out the door, she never failed to remind me to steer clear of both Big Boy and the dirty-magazine aisle.”

— Wally Lamb

79. “Joy said she hadn’t really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who’d banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.”

— Wally Lamb

80. “That coincidence is God’s way of staying invisible?”

— Wally Lamb

81. “Love stories are probably all Ive ever been able to write or want to write.”

— Wally Lamb

82. “A life I didn’t choose chose me.”

— Wally Lamb

83. “Grandma put down her fork. She said she was getting fed up with all of this girlish nonsense from someone who was thirty-two years old. She wanted to remind my mother that in the eyes of the Church she was still a married woman and said she hoped Ma wasn’t reserving herself a room in hell for the sake of one little night of whoop-de-do. I had never thought of Ma as someone capable of whoop-de-do.”

— Wally Lamb

84. “However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences – and I stray pretty far from mine – I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.”

— Wally Lamb

85. “The center of activity on Pierce Street was Connie’s Superette, a little market housed on the bottom floor of a large, asbestos-shingled apartment building. Connie, a fat woman with Lucille Ball red hair, sat behind the counter on a webbed porch chair. She kept a whirring electric fan trained on herself and was careful not to risk breaking her two-inch fingernails as she grudgingly rang up people’s stuff.”

— Wally Lamb

86. “I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.”

— Wally Lamb

87. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

88. “Once I asked Ma who’d taken the picture, but she couldn’t remember. Maybe Ma’s death took it, I thought. Maybe it was laughing back at her, knowing everything that would happen, as she posed in happy ignorance. In Ma’s young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.”

— Wally Lamb

89. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

90. “That’s often the case, of course – that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.”

— Wally Lamb

91. “I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment,” he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

93. “What are you asking God for?” I joked. “A million dollars? Two million?” “I’m not asking Him for anything,” he said. “I’m thanking Him for good food and wine, good health and famiglia.”

— Wally Lamb

94. “As anxious and limited as that love might have been, it had been love nonetheless.”

— Wally Lamb

95. “If Pierre buys a horse for two hundred francs and Jacques buys a mule for a hundred and forty, and the two enter into a partnership and decide to trade their creatures for a piece of land that costs four hundred and eighty francs, then how long will it take a lame Frenchman to borrow a silk umbrella?”

— Wally Lamb

96. “The key to peace within my soul, he said, was to cast aside my bitterness and resentment.”

— Wally Lamb

97. “Stop it! My whole life still hurts!”

— Wally Lamb

98. “The key to serenity is forgiveness.”

— Wally Lamb

99. “She’s got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.”

— Wally Lamb

100. “If it was true that the meek were going to inherit the earth, then Ma was going to be a Rockefeller.”

— Wally Lamb