Wally Lamb

What if I don__ like adventure?Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That__ how you grow.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference.

A life I didn't choose chose me.

Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you." Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was missing. How lonely that life had been: going to work, going home, and watching TV, going places by myself on weekends.

People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them -- to feed them or fix them.

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.

As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.

You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

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?

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

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