Life & Wisdom Quote by Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb slips a small blade into a familiar political slogan and twists. “Family values” is one of those phrases that pretends to be warm and homespun while functioning as a gatekeeping tool; Lamb’s “crowd” turns it into what it often is in practice: a chorus of self-appointed referees. The casual “of course” matters as much as the provocation. It signals that the real scandal isn’t nontraditional love, but how predictable the policing has become. He writes like someone tired of having to argue for oxygen.

The line’s intent is less to redefine love than to expose who gets to define it publicly. By framing love as “shapes and sizes,” Lamb leans on the language of abundance and variation, sidestepping the narrow ledger of acceptable relationships. It’s a strategic move: he doesn’t ask permission or plead for tolerance; he asserts a reality that already exists, then points to the institution that refuses to acknowledge it.

The subtext carries a distinctly late-20th/early-21st-century American friction: the culture-war habit of treating intimacy as legislation. “Condones” is an intentionally chilly verb, evoking moral licensing rather than human recognition, as if affection requires an official stamp. Lamb’s broader fictional world often centers on outsiders, secrets, and the private costs of public judgment; this sentence compresses that theme into a single, sideways rebuke. It’s not a sermon about love. It’s a critique of the people who think they own the vocabulary.