Top 100 Welty Quotes
#1. It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
Carol Windley
#2. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.
Cheryl Strayed
#3. When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.
Frances Mayes
#4. So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
Donna Tartt
#5. Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Robert Morgan
#6. Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't
Donna Tartt
#7. Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.
Barry Unsworth
#8. I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door,
Donna Tartt
#9. I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
Karl Marlantes
#11. 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
#12. Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Eudora Welty
#13. The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Eudora Welty
#14. 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
#15. Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
Eudora Welty
#16. I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them
with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
Eudora Welty
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
Eudora Welty
#23. I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.
Eudora Welty
#24. The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
Eudora Welty
#26. 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
#27. But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.
Eudora Welty
#28. Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.
Eudora Welty
#30. The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by.
Eudora Welty
#31. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#32. 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
#33. It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.
Eudora Welty
#34. 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
#35. Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
Eudora Welty
#36. 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
#37. Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss.
Eudora Welty
#38. Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
#39. I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.
Eudora Welty
#40. Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
Eudora Welty
#41. 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
#42. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Eudora Welty
#43. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? ...
Eudora Welty
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
#48. 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
#49. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
#50. For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.
Eudora Welty
#51. For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty
#53. My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.
Eudora Welty
#54. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty
#55. 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
#56. When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.
Eudora Welty
#57. 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
#58. It doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
Eudora Welty
#59. I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
#60. 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
#61. Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty
#62. 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
#64. I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
#65. Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
Eudora Welty
#66. All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
Eudora Welty
#70. The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Eudora Welty
#71. At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.
Eudora Welty
#72. Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Eudora Welty
#73. He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
Eudora Welty
#74. The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
Eudora Welty
#75. Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
Eudora Welty
#76. 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
#77. Grandma Ponder said, Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I'll show you a wife beater.
Eudora Welty
#78. My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.
Eudora Welty
#79. If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
#80. Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting?
Eudora Welty
#81. One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
Eudora Welty
#82. A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
Eudora Welty
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.
Eudora Welty
#87. A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.
Eudora Welty
#88. She would like to tell him some strange beautiful thing, if she could speak at all, something to make him speak. Communication would be telling something that is all new, so as to have more of the new told back.
Eudora Welty
#89. My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
Eudora Welty
#90. Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
Eudora Welty
#91. By the essence of their nature, which was frail, all human beings were probably doomed to be seasick.
Eudora Welty
#92. Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest.
Eudora Welty
#93. 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
#94. To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
Eudora Welty
#96. 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
#97. A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
#98. The thing that seemed like silence must have been the endless cry of all the crickets and locusts in the world, rising and falling.
("The Wide Net")
Eudora Welty
#99. A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
#100. As soon as a man stopped wandering
and stood still an looked around him,
he found a god in that place.
Eudora Welty
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