Top 120 Wally Lamb Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love?”

— Wally Lamb

102. “Jack kept refilling my mother’s glass with the wine she’d brought. With each sip, she acted more and more like Marilyn Monroe. Grandma was so taken with her special meal, she seemed hardly to notice Ma’s behavior. She even reluctantly accepted a glass of wine herself, and went so far as to wet her lips at the rim.”

— Wally Lamb

103. “There are speckles of paint in his hair and ears and eyebrows, but the mask has protected the rest of his face. I look away when his clean mouth talks.”

— Wally Lamb

104. “We lunch in the grass. My father eats sandwiches stuffed with smelly foods Ma and I refuse to eat: liverwurst, vinegar peppers, Limburger cheese. He drinks hot coffee right from the thermos and his Adam’s apple moves up and down when he swallows.”

— Wally Lamb

105. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

106. “That’s what movies are, right? Thousands of still pictures taken months or years or decades before – streams of images burned onto celluloid that are reeled in front of a lamp and projected onto a screen, allowing us the illusion that they’re alive. Flickers of light and dark. Brightness and shadow that won’t stand still – like life itself.”

— Wally Lamb

107. “You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.”

— Wally Lamb

108. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

109. “He reached over and tweaked one of my bumps, then cuffed me on the chin. “You hiding walnuts in there or something?” “Shut up,” I said. I jumped in and swam the length of the pool, hiding my smile underwater. He was a flirt, that was all. What was wrong with that? If Mrs. Masicotte was stupid enough to buy us a pool because he flirted a little, that was her problem, not ours.”

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

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

— Wally Lamb

112. “Grandma and I were cautiously polite to each other. “Make yourself at home, Dolores,” she said hesitantly as she opened the door to what had once been my mother’s bedroom. The room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the hard mattress, it crackled under me.”

— Wally Lamb

113. “The “what-ifs”: they’ll do a number on you.”

— Wally Lamb

114. “Rivercrest was purgatory, with wheelchairs.”

— Wally Lamb

115. “Evenings after the dishes, Grandma hobbled around the house with her frayed prayer book which was held together with rubber bands. Then she’d settle in front of the television to watch her westerns – “Bonanza,” “Rawhide” – while I sat out at the kitchen signing corny get-well cards to Ma and pages of complaints to Jeanette.”

— Wally Lamb

116. “When he emerged, I’d stand on the stool amidst the steam and the aroma of uncapped Old Spice, watching my face wobble and drip in the medicine cabinet mirror.”

— Wally Lamb

117. “If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.”

— Wally Lamb

118. “It’s just a coincidence, I guess, but just the day before at the dry cleaner’s, one of our customers, Mrs. Chudy, said to me- I forget what we were even talking about, but she said, “My dear, there are no coincidences. That’s just God’s way of remaining anonymous.” And I was like, to myself not to her, yeah? How do you know? But hey, maybe she’s right.”

— Wally Lamb

119. “I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.”

— Wally Lamb

120. “Grandma turned her TV to thunderous volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an “Edge of Night” fan. Sometimes I’d grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with her, slurping intentionally from the bottle. “I hope you don’t sit like that in school,” she said. “It’s unladylike.”

— Wally Lamb

121. “It had occurred to me that Jack and I would be starting out of the house at the same time each morning and that St. Anthony’s School was on his way to work. From that, I had perfected my fantasy: I would arrive in the MG amidst the confusion of buses, share a private laugh with Jack, then swing the door open to my newfound popularity. My hair would have come out as sleek and straight as Marianne Faithfull’s. By lunchtime, I’d be class president.”

— Wally Lamb

122. “I spent the remainder of the visit staring stupidly at the TV, answering Grandma’s questions in single syllables and making faces at her cooking.”

— Wally Lamb

123. “He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile – fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise’s. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she’d be alive. Things would be normal. “You’re normal!” she’d said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.”

— Wally Lamb

124. “One of two things was happening. Either Merton College had folded over the summer and been too cheap to spend a stamp to tell me, or the other girls had seen me struggling up the long flight of steps and locked the door.”

— Wally Lamb

125. “You see, everyone thinks they’re too good for day-old pastry, like one-third off is charity or something. The world is full of snobs. Snobs and slobs. I ought to write a book.”

— Wally Lamb

126. “Blood banged inside my head. I loved my brother. I hated him. There was no solution to who he was. No getting back who he had been.”

— Wally Lamb

127. “She suggested that... I should examine what I had been trying to shoot at and punch and kill for so long- whether or not I had, perhaps, denied some more gentle part of my nature, and if so, what had it cost me. “And don’t get a tattoo for your forehead,” she said, smiling. “It’s entirely unnecessary.” As proof, she held her hands in front of her. Wiggled her fingers and smiled. Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she has said; the gods both laughed and wept.”

— Wally Lamb

128. “Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother’s womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past – connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.”

— Wally Lamb

129. “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.”

— Wally Lamb

130. “Maybe you inherited craziness like you did brown eyes or frizzy hair, I thought. Maybe you just went nuts and did that sort of thing if your mother got a divorce and a new boyfriend.”

— Wally Lamb

131. “I kept changing the station, over and over around the dial, but all I got were those two channels, or snow. I had spent half my life watching TV. I thought again about the paperweight. I’d had it less than a week when I shook too hard and accidentally sent it flying across my bedroom where it hit the floor and cracked. Leaked, became useless. At the time, it was my biggest tragedy – breaking that paperweight.”

— Wally Lamb

132. “He sat down on one of the pilings looking sick and sad and I knew he was thinking about Ma and the baby. I wanted badly to cheer him up but singing commercials seemed the wrong thing to do.”

— Wally Lamb

133. “Their curled-up graduation programs were on the kitchen counter. I located my name, then ripped them up and threw them in the garbage pail. Back in my room, a black-and-white “My Little Margie” rerun had begun. I watched it without sound, eating strands of congealed noodles, biting into cold, sticky shrimps curled tightly into their fetal positions. When I looked out, the sky had lightened to pearl gray. A wet breeze was stirring the catalpa tree.”

— Wally Lamb

134. “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.”

— Wally Lamb