Rebecca Wells

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

“…the love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes.”

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

“I live in an ocean of smell…”

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

“It’s life. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.”

“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.”

“But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.”

“The very air they breathed was almost a juice.”

“There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As {she} sat at the edge of {the lake}, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war at each other.”

“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.'”

“I believe that illness has led me to a life of gratitude, so I consider Lyme disease at this point in my life to be a blessing in disguise.”

“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...”

“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.”

“Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats—let you know if you’re off course. But it ain’t always possible…”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“Sometimes lost treasures can be reclaimed.”

“These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jaggedrocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out.”