Eudora Welty Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

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

Eudora Welty
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order... it is the continuous thread of revelation.

Eudora Welty
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever really lost.

Eudora Welty
Passion is our ground, our island — do others exist?

Eudora Welty
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
The first act of insight is to throw away the labels.

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
All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.

Eudora Welty
She was kind; her company was the next thing to being alone.

Eudora Welty
She [her mother] was teaching me one more, almost her last, lesson: emotions do not grow old. I knew that I would feel as she did, and I do.

Eudora Welty
I haven't a literary life at all, not much of a confession, maybe. But I do feel that the people and things I love are of a true and human world, and there is no clutter about them.... I would not understand a literary life.

Eudora Welty
Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

Eudora Welty
If morning-glories had come out of the horn instead of those sounds, Josie would not have felt a more astonished delight. She was pierced with pleasure.

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.

Eudora Welty
But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

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

Eudora Welty
It is our inward journey that leads us through time—forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling.

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

Eudora Welty
When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.

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

Eudora Welty
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
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