Famous Quotes & Sayings

Eudora Welty Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Eudora Welty.

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Famous Quotes By Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 967592

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 981596

Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1321613

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 2181243

For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1196774

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1830275

A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 380365

Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going? — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1611229

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 143098

Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting? — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 315751

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 620206

For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1104686

The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1672431

Plots are ... what the writer sees with. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 932553

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1454624

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1455680

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1566517

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1555069

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1530949

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1506918

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1502923

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1499205

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1487788

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1481943

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1462486

hardest time: our voice will not be our own. The crusader's voice is the voice of the crowd and must rise louder all the time, for there is, of course, the other side to be drowned out. Worse, the voices of most crowds sound alike. Worse still, the voice that seeks to do other than communicate when it makes a noise has something brutal about it; it is no longer using words as words but as something to brandish, with which to threaten, brag or condemn. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 177668

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1433239

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 198748

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1308811

She flicked an ash into the basket of dirty towels. 'Mrs. Pike is a very decided blonde. She bought me the peanuts.'
'She must be cute,' said Mrs. Fletcher.
'Honey, "cute" ain't the word for what she is. I'm tellin' you, Mrs. Pike is attractive. She has her a good time. She's got a sharp eye out, Mrs. Pike has.
("Petrified Man — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1227965

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 204023

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1188263

It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1184131

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1167016

One place understood helps us understand all places better — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1133753

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1969885

I'm a great reader that never has time to read. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 2222423

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 2218202

Like Phoenix, you work all your life to find your way, through all the obstructions and the false appearances and the upsets you may have brought on yourself, to reach a meaning - using inventions of your imagination, perhaps helped out by your dreams and bits of good luck. And finally too, like Phoenix, you have to assume that what you are working in aid of is life, not death. But you would make the trip anyway - wouldn't you? - just on hope. 1974 — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 2195110

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you ... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 101126

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 2141412

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 2110350

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 2045342

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 2036738

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1983248

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1979460

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1600735

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1915157

Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 170215

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1828101

As soon as a man stopped wandering
and stood still an looked around him,
he found a god in that place. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1747091

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1715018

A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1696758

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1663714

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1616523

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1613062

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1087155

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 512947

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 772782

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 730379

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 712669

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 692982

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 678484

A hidden mussel was blowing bubbles like a spring through the sand where his boot was teasing the water. It was the little pulse of bubbles and not himself or herself that was the moment for her then; and he could have already departed and she could have already wept, and it would have been the same, as she stared at the little fountain rising so gently out of the shimmering sand. A clear love is in the world - this came to her as insistently as the mussel's bubbles through the water. There it was, existing there where they came and were beside it now. It is in the bubble in the water in the river, and it has its own changing and its mysteries of days and nights, and it does not care how we come and go. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 631749

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 593197

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 565082

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 518992

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 518280

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 773969

It's our turn! she'd thought exultantly. And we're going to live forever. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 506962

But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and you may have heard it, protesting against emptiness ... It should be full, he would rush on to tell her, thinking of his heart now as a deep lake, it should be holding love like other hearts. It should be flooded with love. There would be a warm spring day ... Come and stand in my heart, whoever you are, and a whole river would cover your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirlpools, and draw you down to itself, your whole body, your heart too. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 487142

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 482628

When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 411713

Human life is fiction's only theme. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 388940

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 387812

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 229375

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 347326

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 333767

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told
returned to the world it came out of. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 273034

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 934070

The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 265788

By the essence of their nature, which was frail, all human beings were probably doomed to be seasick. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1086140

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 1067328

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1044685

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 207568

It was entirely taken for granted that there wasn't any lying in our family, and I was advanced in adolescence before I realized that in plenty of homes where I played with schoolmates, and went to their parties, children lied to their parents and parents lied to their children and to each other. It took me a long time to realize that these very same everyday lies, and the stratagems and jokes and tricks and dares that went with them, were in fact the basis of the scenes I so well loved to hear about and hoped for and treasured in the conversation of adults. My instinct - the dramatic instinct - was to lead me, eventually, on the right track for a storyteller: the scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions, and promises of things to find out and know about human beings.I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken - and to know a truth, I also had to recognize a lie. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 980520

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 970058

How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk
experiment
is a considerable part of the joy of doing. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 969065

Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 213596

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 965246

For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 1112666

For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 922079

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 902090

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 894177

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 890742

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 872919

Out of love you can speak with straight fury. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 842683

Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 839252

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

Eudora Welty Quotes 804909

And yet Laura could see that they changed every moment. The outside did not change but the inside did; an iridescent life was busy within and under each alikeness. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes 801036

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