Quotes from She's Come Undone

Wally Lamb ·  465 pages

Rating: (278.6K votes)


“Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you... happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit." -Thayer”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone



“It was a matter of perspective, I began to see.
The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist."
-- Dolores Price”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone



“He's splitting me open, I thought. He'll break me and then I'll die.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“He was right. And he was an insensitive shit.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“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.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone



“Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That’s what life’s all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Who gets the change?" the clerk asked. "You or...your fella?"
Oh, he's not my boyfriend," I said. "He's my mother.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Fuck you, I said."
Uh-oh. There's that angry word.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone



“Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“She preferred to get high on life.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“She's got a certain feisty charm for a racist. Not to mention all those great dead-animal stories.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“What if I don’t like adventure?
Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone



“Well, get used to it, the whole world is nuts.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Eventually, I reached the other side of the chasm and understood the differences between the two men. I no longer hated Daddy: he had been a shitty father and a shitty husband - a man who's made two bad choices based on lust and coveting and then been too weak either to live with them or undo them. But he had not been a rapist.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


“Just don't ever let it happen to you, Dolores. Let people just shit all over you. Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet that way I did.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from She's Come Undone


About the author

Wally Lamb
Born place: in Norwich, Connecticut, The United States
Born date October 17, 1950
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Popular quotes

“In the summer you could take out ten books at a time, instead of three, and keep them a month, instead of two weeks. Of course you could take only four of the fiction books, which were the best, but Jane liked plays and they were nonfiction, and Katharine liked poetry and that was nonfiction, and Martha was still the age for picture books, and they didn’t count as fiction but were often nearly as good. Mark hadn’t found out yet what kind of nonfiction he liked, but he was still trying. Each month he would carry home his ten books and read the four good fiction ones in the first four days, and then read one page each from the other six, and then give up. Next month he would take them back and try again. The nonfiction books he tried were mostly called things like “When I was a Boy in Greece,” or “Happy Days on the Prairie”—things that made them sound like stories, only they weren’t. They made Mark furious. “It’s being made to learn things not on purpose. It’s unfair,” he said. “It’s sly.” Unfairness and slyness the four children hated above all.”
― Edward Eager, quote from Half Magic


“11 “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment; * 12and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. 13Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14For many are called, but few are chosen.”
― quote from The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version


“Give her the goddamn Advil, Dibs. Jesus.”
― Lili St. Crow, quote from Jealousy


“Above all else, be true to yourself. Do what YOU want to do. Walk alone and be your own judge. It’ll be a bumpy road sometimes, but you’ll carry yourself a little taller at the end of each and every journey. In the end nobody except you cares whether you run your life at the beck and call of everyone else or whether you choose to be a Warrior-Sage, living your own life.
And that’s the way it should be.”
― Karl Wiggins, quote from You Really Are Full of Shit, Aren't You?


“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo


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