Top 80 Rebecca Wells Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is short but it is wide. This too shall pass.”

— Rebecca Wells

Featured in: Life Is Short Quotes

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

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

4. “How wide and sweet and wild motherhood and sisterhood can be.”

— Rebecca Wells

5. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

6. “Forget love. Try good manners.”

— Rebecca Wells

7. “I am the kind of woman who loves hurricanes. They put me in a party mood. Make me want to eat oysters on the half shell, and act slutty.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

9. “When I’m reading, wherever I am, I’m always somewhere else.”

— Rebecca Wells

10. “Don’t think this means I’m giving you all my secrets. There is more to me than you will ever know.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

12. “I don’t care what the fire department says about fire hazards. I have lived through fire before.”

— Rebecca Wells

13. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

14. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

15. “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?”

— Rebecca Wells

16. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

18. “I swear I could write a book about all the things no one has ever thanked me for.”

— Rebecca Wells

19. “A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet and something else- something spicy almost biting and exotic.”

— Rebecca Wells

20. “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?”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

22. “Smoke, drink and never think.”

— Rebecca Wells

23. “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...”

— Rebecca Wells

24. “I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I’m writing, it’s particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.”

— Rebecca Wells

25. “Maybe 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.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

27. “I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale...”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

29. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

31. “Sometimes lost treasures can be reclaimed.”

— Rebecca Wells

32. “As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager of the plentiful gifts which tumble out of the horn of plenty, which is to say there is a source so sweet and forgiving and generous that I pray every day to let that source be my guide.”

— Rebecca Wells

33. “From her perch on the crescent of the harvest moon, the Holy Lady looked down and smiled at her imperfect children. The angels attending her that night felt little twinges of longing to be in human form, if for only a few minutes. 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.”

— Rebecca Wells

34. “I shake so hard that freckles jump off my face.”

— Rebecca Wells

35. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

37. “Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity- once you loose it, that’s it?”

— Rebecca Wells

38. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

39. “The happiness in her eyes made my heart hurt.”

— Rebecca Wells

40. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

42. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

43. “Don’t ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it’ll be used against you...”

— Rebecca Wells

44. “She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn out cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayou.”

— Rebecca Wells

45. “Well, it’s finally happening. Vivi Abbott Walker has gone over the edge. What they don’t know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale. Although not to many. Vivi ran.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells

47. “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.”

— Rebecca Wells

48. “En un tren, parece que puedas ir a cualquier parte.”

— Rebecca Wells

49. “Honestly, Edythe, Mama says, like she’s going to give her the most important advice in the world, If you continue acting this way, you will be unpopular for the rest of your life. I wish I could go someplace far away.”

— Rebecca Wells

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

— Rebecca Wells