Eudora Welty famous quotes

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
-- Eudora Welty

#Positive #Happiness #Morning

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

#Book #Smell #Library

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, 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. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...
-- Eudora Welty

#Book #Reading #Smell

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

#Stories #Emotion #Speak

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Character #Plot

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

#Fall #Passion #Veils

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
-- Eudora Welty

#Book #Writing #People

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
-- Eudora Welty

#Book #Ends #Coming To An End

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

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Reading

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
-- Eudora Welty

#Memories #Diaries #Letters

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

#Mother #Children #Ice Cream

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
-- Eudora Welty

#Children #Long #Waiting

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Essence #Raw Materials

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

#Mean #Years #Feelings

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
-- Eudora Welty

#Reading #Writing #Expression

We are the breakers of our own hearts
-- Eudora Welty

#Heart

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

#Life #Time #Order

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
-- Eudora Welty

#Novelists #Comfort #Alive

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
-- Eudora Welty

#Unique #Giving #Challenges

The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Thinking #Challenges

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Doe #Stories

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Honestly

I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.
-- Eudora Welty

#Prayer #Believe #Knowledge

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

#Writing #Heart #Character

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

#Character #Would Be #Plot

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

#Country #Art #Voice

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
-- Eudora Welty

#Fiction #Answers #Clear

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Heart #Character

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
-- Eudora Welty

#Spirit #Dickens

Write about what you don't know about what you know.
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing

Never think you've seen the last of anything.
-- Eudora Welty

#Memorable #Thinking #Lasts

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
-- Eudora Welty

#Happiness #Serious #Daring

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
-- Eudora Welty

#Long #Matter #Destination

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

#Grief #Flower #Writing

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?
-- Eudora Welty

#Writing #Heart #Blessing

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
-- Eudora Welty

#Photography #Running #Snapshots