Quotes from The Hour I First Believed

“Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Most helpful, Mr. Caelum," she said. "Very, very useful information. And now, shall we hear from Saint Augustine?"

I shrugged. "Why not?" I said

Dr. P read from a blood-red leather book. "My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?"

She closed the book, then reached across the table and took Maureen's hand in hers. "Does that passage speak to you?" she asked. Mo nodded and began to cry. "And so, Mr. Caelum, good-bye."

Because the passage had spoken to me, too, it took me a few seconds to react. "Oh," I said. "You want me to leave?"

"I do. Yes, yes.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“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.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“sometimes when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Sarcasm is a suit of armor.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave?

You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“..."I love you" was just three meaningless words without the actions that went with them”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“It just wasn't for me, and anyway, those people were a lot more far gone than I was. More in my father's league than mine. I just cut back a little. Less beer and liquor, more jogging. I was fine.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“...there was no shorthand for "I'm sorry." You were obliged to speak those two words.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“[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.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“God, that’s always the thing you have to decide with high school kids: what to make an issue of, what to let go.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That’s when I seen that she has freckles.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, "letting your freak flag fly" is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled together, miserably, in the upper reaches of the bleachers, wearing their oversized raincoats and their secondhand Salvation Army clothes, they stare down at the school-sanctioned celebration of the A list students. They know bullying, these kids--especially the ones who frefuse to exist under the radar. They're tripped in the hallway, shoved against lockers, pelted with Skittles in the lunchroom. For the most part, their tormentors are stealth artists.

The freaks know where there's refuge: I the library, the theater program, art class, creative writing.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“We lived, lulled, on the fault line of chaos. Change could come explosively, and out of nowhere.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“He who goes questing for what he wants may discover, along the way, what he needs.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“For all I know God may be nothing more or nothing less than the sound of the moving water outside your window.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“You think it's worth it? That we're over there for the right reasons?"

He shrugged. "Politics is a luxury you can't necessarily afford when you're over there. You just get up, do your job, and embrace the suck.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“If Pierre buys a horse for two hundred francs and Jacques buys a mule for a hundred and forty, and the two enter into a partnership and decide to trade their creatures for a piece of land that costs four hundred and eighty francs, then how long will it take a lame Frenchman to borrow a silk umbrella?”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

“Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.”
― Wally Lamb, quote from The Hour I First Believed

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Popular quotes

“The fan was spinning and as the shadows passed over the white ceiling I let my eyes unfocus until all of it looked like a universe being born or a planet unraveling, some creation or catastrophe depending on which way gravity was going and where you were standing. So instead of Elizabeth Taylor I thought about stars and how little I knew about them, and how if I was an explorer and I had to sail a boat across the ocean without rador or an electronic compass I’d be screwed because the only constellations I knew were the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and I always got them confused. And even though I knew I’d never have to sail that boat I still wished I knew more about stars and other things. And I wished I could remember lying in the back yard as a kid with my hands locked behind my head, looking up at the night sky and dreaming. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t something I ever did. It would have been a nice memory though”
― Paul Neilan, quote from Apathy and Other Small Victories

“Gosto de ser belicoso, como bom filho de Ogum. Quando me virem tranquilo, é que já estou apodrecendo.”
― Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, quote from Dirty Havana Trilogy

“I wish he hadn't gone and cut his hair.
He looks about eight years old.
His ears have tripled in size.
Everyone's started calling him Dumbo.
Which wouldn't be so bad,
except they've started calling me
Mrs. Dumbo.

You can't even tell
he's got curly hair anymore.
There's nothing left
to run my fingers through.
Just this weird
blond AstroTurf
sprouting out of his skull.”
― Sonya Sones, quote from What My Mother Doesn't Know

“Hey girls, did you hear the news? It's just been scientifically proven that barrettes are dangerous! So are bracelets and bric-a-brac. It's a fact. And don't be fooled by thick-necked macho men who pretend that "girl stuff" is boring or frivolous, because that's just an act. Because as soon as you ask that guy to hold your purse for a minute, he will start to squirm, as if your handbag were full of worms, as he holds it as far away from his rugged body as possible. Because "girl stuff" is made with the gender equivalent of Kryptonite!”
― Julia Serano, quote from Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“It is no disaster to be unhappy but how discouraging it must be to know that there is nothing to pin the blame on, outside oneself?”
― Gerard Reve, quote from De avonden

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