Eudora Welty quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Eudora Welty on Wise Famous Quotes.

For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.

Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.

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.

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

Write about what you don't know about what you know.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting?

The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers ... great talkers.

Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

I've said what I had to say.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.

It's our turn! she'd thought exultantly. And we're going to live forever.

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

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told
returned to the world it came out of.

The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.

For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.

By the essence of their nature, which was frail, all human beings were probably doomed to be seasick.

Welcome!" I said - the most dangerous word in the world.

Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss.

It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.

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

Suppose you meet me in the woods.

It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.

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

At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.

For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.

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.

Human life is fiction's only theme.

From the first I was clamorous to learn ...

It doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

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

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

Out of love you can speak with straight fury.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

One place understood helps us understand all places better

Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery ... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

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

He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")

In the end, it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine.

He loved happiness like I love tea.

For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.

All serious daring starts from within.

Beware of a man with manners.

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.

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

The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by.

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

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.

A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.

To imagine yourself inside another person ... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

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

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

The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again

How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

Grandma Ponder said, Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I'll show you a wife beater.

Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest.

He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

I was always my own teacher.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

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.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?

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

When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.

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

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.

As soon as a man stopped wandering
and stood still an looked around him,
he found a god in that place.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

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

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