Eudora Welty
31 quotes
Biography
"Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading."
"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."
"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"
"What can place not give? Theme. It can present theme, show it to the last detail — but place is forever illustrative: it is a picture of what man has done and imagined, it is his visible past, result. Human life is fiction’s only theme. ("Place in Fiction")"
"The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time."
"The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive."
"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."
"Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most."
"All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment."
"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 up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, 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."
"Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?"
"It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans. (beginning of "The Purple Hat ")"
"Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams and in Natchez it was the bitterest winter of them all. (beginning of "First Love ")"
"One morning in summertime, when all his sons and daughters were off picking plums and Little Lee Roy was all alone, sitting on the porch and only listening to the screech owls away down in the woods, he had a surprise. (beginning of "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden")"
"She had been out in the rain. She stood in front of the cabin fireplace, her legs wide apart, bending over, shaking her wet yellow head crossly, like a cat reproaching itself for not knowing better. She was talking to herself-only a small fluttering sound, hard to lay hold of in the sparsity of the room. (beginning of "A Piece of News")"
"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."
"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 excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy."
"No art ever came out of not risking your neck."
"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 up of themselves like grass."
"I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end."
"There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer."
"Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams."
"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."
"A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away."