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.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

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.

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

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I've undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary__ mother had accepted him as her son__ lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she__ barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she__ hunted through her son__ drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. __And yet,_ he whispered, __he janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he__ openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers_ What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he__ become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. __he irony,_ he said, __ is that now that I__ this blind man, it__ clearer to me than it__ ever been before. What__ the line? __as blind but now I see__ He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. __ou accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought_said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message_ That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I__ fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That__ what makes me sad. Everyone__ so scared to be happy._ __ know what you mean,_ I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. __o you don__,_ he said. __ou mustn__. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you__e afraid._ ____ not afraid. It__ more like_ I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. ____l give you what I learned from all this,_ he said. __ccept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!