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

“Nights with bright pivots, departure, matter, uniquely voice, uniquely naked each day. Upon your breasts of still current, upon your legs ofharshness and water, upon the permanence and pride of your naked hair, I want to lie, my love, the tears now cast into the raucous basket where they gather, I want to lie, my love, alone with a syllable of destroyed silver, alone with a tip of your snowy breast.   It is not now possible, at times, to win except by falling, it is not now possible, between two people, to tremble, to touch the river’s flower: man fibers come like needles, transactions, fragments, families of repulsive coral, tempests and hard passages through carpets of winter.   Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist crest, drops of when and how, indefinite traffic: between lips and lips, as if along a coast of sand and glass, the wind passes.   That is why you are endless, gather me up as if you were all solemnity, all nocturnal like a zone, until you merge with the lines of time.   Advance in sweetness, come to my side until the digital leaves of the violins have become silent, until the moss takes root in the thunder, until from the throbbing of hand and hand the roots come down.   VALS Yo toco el odio como pecho diurno, yo sin cesar, de ropa en ropa, vengo durmiendo lejos.”
― Pablo Neruda, quote from Residence on Earth

“They say no land remains to be discovered, no continent is left unexplored. But the whole world is out there, waiting, just waiting for me. I want to do things-- I want to walk the rain-soaked streets of London, and drink mint tea in Casablanca. I want to wander the wastelands of the Gobi desert and see a yak. I think my life's ambition is to see a yak. I want to bargain for trinkets in an Arab market in some distant, dusty land. There's so much. But, most of all, I want to do things that will mean something.”
― Lisa Ann Sandell, quote from A Map of the Known World

“Non permettete a nessuno di dirvi che la vendetta non è dolce: lo è. Lo so.”
― Joanne Harris, quote from Sleep, Pale Sister

“Angry at his parents and all grown-ups who thought that school life was a lark, a good time, the best years of your life with a few test and quizzes thrown in to keep you on your toes. Bullshit. There was nothing good about it. Tests were daily battles in the larger war of school. School meant rules and orders and commands. To say nothing of homework.”
― Robert Cormier, quote from Beyond the Chocolate War

“I pictured Becs and myself together, squabbling, but always over little things, while I rotted away at the core from love of Ferris.
It was hopeless.
‘Here.’ I laid my hands on the table, palms up, and jerked my head at them, ‘put yours on top.’
Ferris did not move.
‘Please,’ I said.
He laid his cold hands on mine and I curled my fingers, folding his within them.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’ve neither accepted nor refused. Speak it out plainly, tell me and I’ll do it.’
He cried, ‘Don’t put it onto me! Choose for yourself.’
‘This is choosing. Tell Aunt I will do whatever you’ll have me do, and that’s my answer.’ I kept hold of his fingers. We stayed there silent and motionless for some time, while the candles burnt down.
At last he said quietly, ‘It is a lot to give up.’
‘Well. My history is bad enough without bigamy,’ I replied, at which he smiled but made no reply. The candles were half burnt. I took one and rose.
‘Goodnight, Ferris.’
‘Goodnight, Jacob.”
― Maria McCann, quote from As Meat Loves Salt

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