Rebecca Wells Quotes

I now know that things I always thought I could depend on can crash in an instant. Because of the love that I have been shown, I now know what it means to be 'beloved.' I now know that no breath is to be taken for granted.

I believe that we are given strength and help from a power much larger than ourselves. I believe if I humble myself that this power will come through me, and help me create work that is bigger than I would have ever been able to have done alone.

Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to. This is something that I've struggled with my whole life long.

The very air they breathed was almost a juice.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

Many people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.

Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.

You don't get no trophies for livin the life you born into. It just be your job, and you lucky if you can do the work set out in front of you and not fret if it seem puny.
Chaney, Little Altars Everywhere

Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans.

pretty is as pretty does

I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale..

Don't ever worry bout bein holy, babychild. Just keep your eyes wide open except when you sleep. Then let the Lord's mighty vision see you through the night.

She's smiling that smile they smile before they grow bosoms.

Shep claimed eating cake like that so early in the morning was a 'whore's breakfast.' The rest of them didn't care. They were happy little whores who didn't worry about saving a morsel.

Say there is no truth. Say there are only scraps that we feebly try to sew togethr.

At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.

True love is not a crock, but patriotism is.

Sometimes lost treasures can be reclaimed.

I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read 'The Piano Fairy Girl.'

Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.

Books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them.

What Sidda did not know was how much more singing there was when Vivi was growing up. That's the kind of thing the history books don't tell you. How people sang outdoors all the time.

Every time I thought that I was "put together," I realized that we're always putting ourselves together, gathering the world in, letting it sift down and form us.

You do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.

A full moon shimmered over central Louisiana. This was no rinky-dink moon. This was a moon you had to curtsy to. A big, heavy, mysterious, beautiful, bossy moon. The kind you want to serve things to on a silver platter.

I value humor, kindness, and the ability to tell a good story far more than money, status, or the kind of car someone drives.

Forget love. Try good manners.

Smoke, drink and never think.

The alligators can get you at any age, Buddy. But the worst thing you can do is freeze.

She breathed in the vast world of suffering and pure, dark love, and as she did, a well of compassion began to flow in her.

The words shot through Vivi's bones and blood and muscle, and her body relaxed, so that when her feet touched the ground they met the earth differently, as though they had found roots that reached deep down and anchored to something tender and undamaged.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Zip it kiddo. Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you later in life.

What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

Do you think any of us know how to love?! Do you think anybody would ever do anything if they waited until they knew how to love?! Do you think that babies would ever get made or meals cooked or crops planed or books written or what God-damn-have-you? Do you think people would even get out of bed in the morning if they waited until they knew how to love? You have had too much therapy. Or not enough. God knows how to love, kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors.
Forget love. Try good manners.

She used to say she could taste sleep and that it was as delicious as a BLT on fresh French bread.

Uncountable the number off breaths I've taken for granted in my life.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

They wanted to rock, they wanted to roll, they wanted to feel the peculiarly human feeling of having a perfect night in an imperfect world.

Life is short, but it is wide. Genevieve Whitman taught me that.

In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.

You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats - let you know if you're off course. But it ain't always possible ...

Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages ...

See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.

Looking up at her, Teensy said, "Any baggage you have, Bébé, ceased to be only yours the minute that sperm hit that egg.

[T]he right way to pray is not to beg, but to picture good things, to banish all bad things from our mind.

I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

The process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.

This is a cardinal Ya-Ya rule: you must meet each person's eyes while clinking glasses in a toast. Otherwise, the ritual has no meaning, it's just pure show. And that is something the Ya-Yas are not.

She leaned down and smelled the skin at Connor's shoulders right at the spots where, as Martha Graham might have said, his own wings might have been attached.

[D]ance can become prayer and prayer can become dance.

The notes danced through the June air; Vivi could feel them dust her hair and shoulders. She could feel the notes enter her and settle deep into her bones.

As Vivi drove, it seemed that not only the Ya-Ya's bodies but the earth and sky were sweating. The very air they breathed was almost a juice. Moonlight spilled down into the convertible, onto the four friends' shoulders and knees and on the tops of their heads, so that their hair seemed to have little sparks shooting off it. Vivi had no idea at all where she was headed, but she knew that whatever direction she went, her friends would go with her.

Mama parted with these Divine Secrets because I asked her to, Sidda thought. the reason I feel like crying, Sidda realized, is not just because this scrapbook is vulnerable, but because Mama, whether she knows it or not, has made herself so vulnerable to me.

You can't let fear of hurricanes stop your from putting seeds in the ground, even if they're going to grow tall only to be destroyed.

Sidda sank down into the wide flannel embrace of their bodies, and she rested. For a moment she died a little death, they died it together.

Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming to the island from Canada, and after that when they come from the fields in La Connor, not far from where I live.

Those porch girls had no idea they were going to sprawl on that couch until the weight of their adolescent bodies sank down into the pillows. They have no idea when they will get up off that couch. They have no plans for what will happen next. They only know their bodies touching as they try to keep cool. They only know that the coolest spot they can find is in front of that rotary fan.
I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhibit my life like a porch.

But all she wanted to do was lie in bed, eat Kraft macaroni and cheese, and hide from the alligators.

Sadness can find you anywhere, anytime, so you better have fun when you can.

Some women pray for their daughters to marry good husbands. I pray that my girls will find girlfriends half as loyal and true as the Ya-Yas.

Of all the secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the most divine was humor.

Listen to me, Siddalee, and listen good: There is no excuse to let your looks go, no matter how poor you are. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, but honey let me tell you, ugliness will get you nowhere.

It was the kind ... of Southern women ... who believe ... that it is impossible to arrive in a new place without a pair of shoes to match every possible change of clothes.

Nothing picks me up quicker than a movie, a Coca-Cola, and a box of popcorn. I could walk in feeling like I didn't want to live anymore, and walk out on cloud nine.

Good Lord didn't mean for us to hate ourself. He made us to love ourself like He do, with wide open arms.

When the Deep Purple falls,
Over sleepy garden walls,
And the stars begin to flicker in the sky,
Thru the mist of a memory
You wander back to me,
Breathing my name with a sigh.
In the still of the night,
Once again I hold you tight,
Tho' you're gone, your love lives on
When moonlight beams.
And as long as my heart will beat
Lover, we'll always meet
Here in my Deep Purple dreams.