Eudora Welty Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

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
The storm had rolled away to faintness like a wagon crossing a bridge.

Eudora Welty
Always in a house of death, Virgie was thinking, all the stories come evident, show forth from the person, become a part of the public domain. Not the dead's story, but the living's.

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

Eudora Welty
Miss Eckhart worshiped her metronome. She kept it, like the most precious secret in the teaching of music, in a wall safe.

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

Eudora Welty
Her face worked and broke into strained, hardening lines, as if there had been a death — that too-explicit evidence of agony in the desire to communicate.

Eudora Welty
The very next moment, something terrible almost happened.

Eudora Welty
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
The very greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself.

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

Eudora Welty
Insight doesn't happen often in the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but it comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

Eudora Welty
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
Her smile reminded me of the way a child will open its mouth all right, but not let out the cry till it sees the right person.

Eudora Welty