"A happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story."
— Leah Stewart

"So Sonia was not my only or even my first best friend. She was the last. It wasn t that I hadn t made friends since just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn t grant you an exclusive isn t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn t imagine ever living that moment again when you say with a shy and hopeful pride You re my best friend. The other person says it back and there you have chosen each other out of everyone else in the world. "
— Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me: A Novel)

"Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four a.m."
— Wally Lamb

"But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?"
— Wally Lamb (I Know This Much Is True)

"Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book."
— Wally Lamb (The Hour I First Believed: A Novel)

""Fuck you, I said."
"Uh-oh. There's that angry word.""
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that."
— Mark Vonnegut

"Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening."
— Mark Vonnegut (The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity)

"Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"No art is possible without a dance with death."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."
— Oscar Wilde

"One has a right to judge a man by the effect he has over his friends."
— Oscar Wilde

"The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself."
— Oscar Wilde

"Some things are too important to be taken seriously."
— Oscar Wilde

"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"A happy ending isn't really the end. It's just the place where you choose to stop telling the story."
— Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me: A Novel)

"Once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it."
— Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me: A Novel)

"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 (She's Come Undone)

"Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out."
— Wally Lamb (I Know This Much Is True)