Top 100 Welty's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't
Donna Tartt
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
Eudora Welty
#7. The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
Eudora Welty
#8. He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
Eudora Welty
#9. Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Eudora Welty
#10. 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
#11. The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Eudora Welty
#12. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
Eudora Welty
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
#16. Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
Eudora Welty
#17. I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty
#22. 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
#23. I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
#24. It doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
Eudora Welty
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing
ambiguity is a fact of life.
Eudora Welty
#33. The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
Eudora Welty
#34. When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
Eudora Welty
#35. 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
#36. It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.
Eudora Welty
#37. Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.
Eudora Welty
#38. It's our turn! she'd thought exultantly. And we're going to live forever.
Eudora Welty
#39. 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
#40. Grandma Ponder said, Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I'll show you a wife beater.
Eudora Welty
#41. 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
#42. A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.
Eudora Welty
#43. A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.
Eudora Welty
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
Eudora Welty
#48. One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
Eudora Welty
#49. Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting?
Eudora Welty
#50. If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by.
Eudora Welty
#57. Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.
Eudora Welty
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
Eudora Welty
#63. I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.
Eudora Welty
#64. Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
Eudora Welty
#65. It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.
Eudora Welty
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
Eudora Welty
#72. 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
#73. The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Eudora Welty
#74. Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Eudora Welty
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty
#83. For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.
Eudora Welty
#84. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
#85. 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
#86. Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
#88. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty.
Cheryl Strayed
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Eudora Welty
#93. 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
#94. Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
Eudora Welty
#95. I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.
Eudora Welty
#96. Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
Eudora Welty
#100. 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
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