Welty Quotes & Sayings

What we know about writing the novel is the novel. — Eudora Welty

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

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 singles out for praise Austen's "habit of seeing both sides of her own subject - of seeing it indeed in the round" ... Both men and women can be vain about their appearances, selfish about money, overawed by rank, and limited by parochialism; both men and women can function capably, think profoundly, feel deeply, create imaginatively, laugh wittily, and love faithfully. Without vindicating the rights of anyone directly, Austen posits a humanism far ahead of her time. "How really modern she is, after all," Welty concludes of Austen. — Emily Auerbach

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

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

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

Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

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

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

In the end, it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine. — Eudora Welty

At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his. — Eudora Welty

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

He was surprised at the way she answered. She had taken a long time to say that. She had nodded her head in a deep way too. Had she wished to affect him with some sort of premonition? He wondered unhappily. Or was it only that she would not help him, after all, by talking with him? For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall. He had lived a month in which nothing had happened except in his head and his body - an almost inaudible life of heartbeats and dreams that came back, a life of fever and privacy, a delicate life which had left him weak to the point of - what? Of begging. The pulse in his palm leapt like a trout in a brook.

("Death of a Traveling Salesman") — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch — Kathy Fish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there. — Eudora Welty

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

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While" to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct. — Eudora Welty

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

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings. — Eudora Welty

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

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

Suppose you meet me in the woods. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

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

Even as we grew up, my mother could not help imposing herself between her children and whatever it was they might take it in mind to reach out for in the world. For she would get it for them, if it was good enough for them
she would have to be very sure
and give it to them, at whatever cost to herself: valiance was in her very fibre. She stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look dangerous, and so it had been to her. A way had to be found around her love sometimes, without challenging that, and at the same time cherishing it in its unassailable strength. Each of us children did, sooner or later, in part at least, solve this in a different, respectful, complicated way. — Eudora Welty

[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

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

It might be if he had not appeared the way he did appear that day she would never have looked so closely at him, but the time people come makes a difference. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

Welty's instruction; that I'd had a concussion. That I hadn't — Donna Tartt

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

We are the breakers of our own hearts — Eudora Welty

He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman") — Eudora Welty

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

I've said what I had to say. — Eudora Welty

Beware of a man with manners. — Eudora Welty

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

She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams. — Eudora Welty

In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are really a fatted calf. It may not be a grand feast by traditional standards, but it is a feast, as called for upon the return of the Prodigal Son, even if the son turns out to be a daughter. Like the brothers in the parable, Sister is irritated and envious that the child who left, and ostensibly used up her "share" of familial goodwill, is instantly welcomed, her sins so quickly forgiven. Then — Thomas C. Foster

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

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

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth. — Eudora Welty

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards. — Eudora Welty

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

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

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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

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

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

It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over. — Eudora Welty

In children's art class we sat in a ring of kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off wiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell of the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson - as shouldn't it be? Children, like animals use all their sense to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again. Here and there, it's the same world. Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never lost it. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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