Eudora Welty Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

Eudora Welty
Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.

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

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 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
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
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
I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

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

Eudora Welty
Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again. Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never lost it.

Eudora Welty
No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

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

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

Eudora Welty
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
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
Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.

Eudora Welty
Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery, it is not words that make it so in life, but words have to make it so in a story. Brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go.

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

Eudora Welty
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
He loved being happy! He loved happiness like I love tea.

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

Eudora Welty
They bit their underlips tightly as old people do in carrying out acts of rudeness.

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

Eudora Welty
His memory could work like the slinging of a noose to catch a wild pony.

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