Top 100 Eudora Welty Quotes
#2. Up home we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it," her mother used to say. "We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.
Eudora Welty
#3. Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Eudora Welty
#4. The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Eudora Welty
#5. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.
Eudora Welty
#6. Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
Eudora Welty
#7. Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.
Eudora Welty
#8. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
Eudora Welty
#9. For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.
Eudora Welty
#10. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
#11. In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.
("The Wide Net")
Eudora Welty
#12. Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
Eudora Welty
#13. I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.
Eudora Welty
#15. Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
Eudora Welty
#17. As though what he did were the excuse for their own boredom then, and lack of concern.
He is just like other people to them. He could easily have danced with a troupe of angels in Paradise every night and they wouldn't have guessed.
Eudora Welty
#18. It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.
Eudora Welty
#19. At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.
Eudora Welty
#20. Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
Eudora Welty
#21. Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.
Eudora Welty
#22. Both reading and writing are experiences
lifelong
in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
Eudora Welty
#23. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Eudora Welty
#24. The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
Eudora Welty
#25. Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
Eudora Welty
#27. How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?
Eudora Welty
#28. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
#29. For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.
Eudora Welty
#31. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty
#32. There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.
Eudora Welty
#33. The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.
Eudora Welty
#34. It doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
Eudora Welty
#35. I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
#36. And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house. The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger. It was necessary to do what? ... to talk.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
Eudora Welty
#37. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
Eudora Welty
#38. I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
#39. Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
Eudora Welty
#40. All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
#41. A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
Eudora Welty
#42. Once you're into a story everything seems to apply- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.
Eudora Welty
#43. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
Eudora Welty
#44. The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Eudora Welty
#45. Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Eudora Welty
#46. The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
Eudora Welty
#47. Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
Eudora Welty
#48. Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
#49. Grandma Ponder said, Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I'll show you a wife beater.
Eudora Welty
#50. Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting?
Eudora Welty
#51. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.
Eudora Welty
#52. The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again
Eudora Welty
#53. Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery ... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.
Eudora Welty
#54. A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.
Eudora Welty
#55. A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.
Eudora Welty
#56. By the essence of their nature, which was frail, all human beings were probably doomed to be seasick.
Eudora Welty
#57. Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest.
Eudora Welty
#58. No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
#60. On a cold bubbling spring, covered dishes and crocks and pitchers of milk and butter and so on flouated in a circle in the mild whirlpool, like horse on a merry-go-round, in the water that smelled of the mint that grew close by.
Eudora Welty
#61. A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
#62. It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening.
("Death of a Traveling Salesman")
Eudora Welty
#63. Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Eudora Welty
#64. For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.
Eudora Welty
#65. He's blind, and nearly deaf in the bargain," Mrs. Martello said proudly. "And he's going in surgery just as soon as they get him all fixed up for it. He's got a malignancy.
Eudora Welty
#66. Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.
Eudora Welty
#67. Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
Eudora Welty
#68. He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.
Eudora Welty
#69. Welcome!" I said - the most dangerous word in the world.
Eudora Welty
#70. Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers ... great talkers.
Eudora Welty
#71. Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.
Eudora Welty
#72. It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.
Eudora Welty
#73. Don't give anybody up ... or leave anybody out ... There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help.
Spoken by Jack to Gloria
Eudora Welty
#74. Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.
Eudora Welty
#75. To imagine yourself inside another person ... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
Eudora Welty
#76. The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it
it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.
Eudora Welty
#77. And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.
Eudora Welty
#78. Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty
#79. People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel ... but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
Eudora Welty
#80. The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty
#81. The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.
Eudora Welty
#82. Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Eudora Welty
#83. When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.
Eudora Welty
#84. Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.
Eudora Welty
#85. Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?
Eudora Welty
#86. What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
#87. I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
Eudora Welty
#88. I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other
Eudora Welty
#89. Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.
Eudora Welty
#90. My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
Eudora Welty
#92. Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.
Eudora Welty
#93. Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Eudora Welty
#94. I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.
Eudora Welty
#95. Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.
Eudora Welty
#96. One place understood helps us understand all places better
Eudora Welty
#97. Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Eudora Welty
#98. I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
Eudora Welty
#99. Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way ... Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.
Eudora Welty
#100. For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.
Eudora Welty
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