Quotes from Rebecca Wells

The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad, and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch still surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner . . .I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Siddalee looked at me like: You liar, Daddy, you big liar. I don't know why I'm thinking

thinking: I don't want my little girl to come out blind or gouged up. I'm not cheap, I'm scared. It's the story of my life: not stingy, just a goddamn coward.

social structure of Troop 55. There are

and I will always have to be careful with each other. She

sits on the bedspread between her and Necie. I can smell that nail polish in the clean cool air of the woods. The minute Mama opens her mouth I realize she's had at least four drinks. Her voice is loose and deep and content and amused, and she says: Edythe, don't you ever

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

smoke, drink, never think—borrowed from Billie Holiday.

Très Ya-Ya-No!

I danced with her mother on an old wooden floor where rhythm was queen. I danced with her father as he held her mother. I danced with her mother when her belly was big, a sail blown full with the wind. I held her mother as she let go of the earth's pull, as her family did its best to let the sweet dancing mother come home to me.

sparklers out in front of her. Staring at them, she thought: These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jagged rocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out. Let me see my daughter like my mother could never see me. Let her see me, too.

Life is not a book. You can't just set it down on the coffee table and walk away from it when it gets boring or you get tired.

Sidda and I will always have to be careful with each other.

The happiness in her eyes made my heart hurt.

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

That it is kindness that makes you rich.

Life is short, but it is wide. This too shall pass.

I don't care what the fire department says about fire hazards. I have lived through fire before.

when we done went and ripped all the gold HIS monograms off the anniversary towels and writ SHITHEAD on them with magic markers.

the ocean is my mother.

supposed to walk off my block, Sherry says, like a real whiny-baby.

hope they remember that when they get older. When they count up the things I did and didn't do. I never gave the drinking a second

I had just asked the kids what would have made them feel more loved. But

I was near, even though she couldn't see me. But then I'm always expecting too much from the girl, wanting her to know things she can't