Eudora Welty - One Writer's Beginnings (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

Eudora Welty