Eudora Welty Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

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
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
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 part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.

Eudora Welty
All orphans were at once wondering and stoic — at one moment loving everything too much, the next folding back from it, tightly as hard green buds growing in the wrong direction, closing as they go.

Eudora Welty
For the first time in her life she thought, might the same wonders never come again? Was each wonder original and alone like the falling star, and when it fell did it bury itself beyond where you hunted it?

Eudora Welty
Her voice had the sway of an aerialist crossing the high wire.

Eudora Welty
She was a perfect lady — just set in her seat and stared.

Eudora Welty
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.

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
He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.

Eudora Welty
My wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Eudora Welty
The inviolable grief she had felt for a great thing only widened her capacity to take little things hard.

Eudora Welty