Literary Birthday – 8 February – Rebecca Wells

Happy Birthday, Rebecca Wells, born 8 February 1952.

12 Quotes

As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager.
Books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them.
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?
It’s life. You don’t figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.
I try to believe that God doesn’t give you more than one little piece of the story at once. You know, the story of your life. Otherwise your heart would crack wider than you could handle. He only cracks it enough so you can still walk, like someone wearing a cast. But you’ve still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it. Nobody sees it. Everybody thinks you’re one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they would if they could see that crack.
When I’m reading, wherever I am, I’m always somewhere else.
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.
There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.
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?
Sadness can find you anywhere, any time, so you better have fun when you can.
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 judgement.
Life is short, but it is wide.

Rebecca Wells is an American author and theatre director. She wrote the Ya-Ya Sisterhood series of books, which includes Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Little Altars Everywhere, and Ya-Yas in Bloom.