The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Wally Lamb

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

Love, People, Drink

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.

cancer, dolores, fat, pretty-girl

I didn’t respond to him. Couldn’t speak at all. Couldn’t look at his self-mutilation–not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter’s hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.

feelings, hands, puppet, self-mutilation

We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.

adversity, destructive, flexible, human-nature, life, path, resistance, self-awareness, strong, willful

Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

insight, perception, perspective, understanding

What if I don’t like adventure?Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.

adventure, life

A life I didn’t choose chose me.

choice, growth, life, pain, suffering

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

change, growth, wisdom

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.

compassion, devotion, people, service

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

insightful, phrasing, poetic

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.

life, love, luck, she-s-come-undone