Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.

— Wally Lamb

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

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

I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation--not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.

— Wally Lamb

If 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

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

— Wally Lamb

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.

— Wally Lamb

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

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Broker 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

Is 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