Eudora Welty Quotes

Never think you've seen the last of anything. ~ Eudora Welty

There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered on night in darkness and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (identity unknown) called "Where Is The Voice Coming From?" But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. I'm not sure this story was brought off; and I don't believe that my anger showed me anything about human character that my sympathy and rapport never had. ~ Eudora Welty

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. ~ 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. ~ 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 like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art. ~ Eudora Welty

Beware of a man with manners. ~ Eudora Welty

Ashamed, shrugging a little, and then shivering, he took his bags and went out. The cold of the air seemed to lift him bodily. The moon was in the sky.
On the slope he began to run, he could not help it. Just as he reached the road, where his car seemed to sit in the moonlight like a boat, his heart began to give off tremendous explosions like a rifle, bang bang bang.
He sank in fright onto the road, his bags falling about him. He felt as if all this had happened before. He covered his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing the noise it made.
But nobody heard it.
(Death of a Traveling Salesman ~ Eudora Welty

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me. ~ Eudora Welty

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion. ~ Eudora Welty

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street. ~ Eudora Welty

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you ... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it. ~ Eudora Welty

The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it
it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape. ~ Eudora Welty

When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we wrote notes to each other perhaps on the hour. Our devoted mother would pass them for us, after first running them in a hot oven to kill the germs. They came into our hands curled up and warm, sometimes scorched like toast. ~ Eudora Welty

In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.
("The Wide Net") ~ Eudora Welty

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

hardest time: our voice will not be our own. The crusader's voice is the voice of the crowd and must rise louder all the time, for there is, of course, the other side to be drowned out. Worse, the voices of most crowds sound alike. Worse still, the voice that seeks to do other than communicate when it makes a noise has something brutal about it; it is no longer using words as words but as something to brandish, with which to threaten, brag or condemn. ~ Eudora Welty

The thing that seemed like silence must have been the endless cry of all the crickets and locusts in the world, rising and falling.
("The Wide Net") ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity. ~ Eudora Welty

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

But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping. ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame. ~ Eudora Welty

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

There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned. ~ Eudora Welty

Like Phoenix, you work all your life to find your way, through all the obstructions and the false appearances and the upsets you may have brought on yourself, to reach a meaning - using inventions of your imagination, perhaps helped out by your dreams and bits of good luck. And finally too, like Phoenix, you have to assume that what you are working in aid of is life, not death. But you would make the trip anyway - wouldn't you? - just on hope. 1974 ~ Eudora Welty

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. ~ Donna Tartt

Human life is fiction's only theme. ~ Eudora Welty

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist? ~ Eudora Welty

They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant's- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights
the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers. ~ Eudora Welty

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing. ~ Carol Windley

She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river. She saw her waist disappear into reflection less water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All seemed one weight, one matter -- until she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instan ~ Eudora Welty

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction. ~ Eudora Welty

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

On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on. ~ Eudora Welty

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. ~ Eudora Welty

In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me. ~ Eudora Welty

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner. ~ Frances Mayes

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid? ~ Eudora Welty

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

At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that. ~ Eudora Welty

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

The other option was to go to the public library. Few people came back from a visit to the library. There was one girl a few years ago the survived the summer reading program at the Night Vale Public Library. The girl, Tamika Flynn, defeated the librarian that had imprisoned her and her classmates using the switchblade hidden in every hardback edition of Eudora Welty's touching homecoming novel, The Optimist's Daughter. But few who have seen a librarian up close have survived or been in a physical condition to communicate. ~ Joseph Fink

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. ~ Eudora Welty

But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and you may have heard it, protesting against emptiness ... It should be full, he would rush on to tell her, thinking of his heart now as a deep lake, it should be holding love like other hearts. It should be flooded with love. There would be a warm spring day ... Come and stand in my heart, whoever you are, and a whole river would cover your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirlpools, and draw you down to itself, your whole body, your heart too. ~ Eudora Welty

Suppose you meet me in the woods. ~ Eudora Welty

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

How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk
experiment
is a considerable part of the joy of doing. ~ Eudora Welty

On a cold bubbling spring, covered dishes and crocks and pitchers of milk and butter and so on flouated in a circle in the mild whirlpool, like horse on a merry-go-round, in the water that smelled of the mint that grew close by. ~ Eudora Welty

Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going? ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

Out of love you can speak with straight fury. ~ Eudora Welty

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you
and other people
any trouble. ~ 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

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

Our Victrola stood in the diningroom. I was allowed to climb onto the seat of a diningroom chair to wind it, start the record turning, and set the needle playing. In a second I'd jumped to the floor, to spin or march around the room as the music called for - now there were all the other records I could play too. I skinned back onto the chair just in time to lift the needle at the end, stop the record and turn it over, then change the needle. Winding up, dancing, being cocked to start and stop the record, was of course, all in one the act of listening. Movement must be at the very heart of listening. ~ Eudora Welty

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

We are the breakers of our own hearts ~ Eudora Welty

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

Plots are ... what the writer sees with. ~ Eudora Welty

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

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction. ~ Eudora Welty

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified! ~ Eudora Welty

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. ~ Eudora Welty

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 ~ Eudora Welty

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? ~ Eudora Welty

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

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer. ~ Eudora Welty

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away. ~ Eudora Welty

It was examinations (in school) that drove my wits away, as all emergencies do. Being expected to measure up was paralysing. It was never that Mother wanted me to beat my classmates in grades, what she wanted was for me to have my answers right. It was unclouded perfection I was up against. ~ Eudora Welty

A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps. ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms. ~ Eudora Welty

A hidden mussel was blowing bubbles like a spring through the sand where his boot was teasing the water. It was the little pulse of bubbles and not himself or herself that was the moment for her then; and he could have already departed and she could have already wept, and it would have been the same, as she stared at the little fountain rising so gently out of the shimmering sand. A clear love is in the world - this came to her as insistently as the mussel's bubbles through the water. There it was, existing there where they came and were beside it now. It is in the bubble in the water in the river, and it has its own changing and its mysteries of days and nights, and it does not care how we come and go. ~ Eudora Welty

Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears. ~ Eudora Welty

All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Children were allowed to go without chaperone in the afternoons. My sense of making fictional comedy undoubtedly first caught its spark from the antic pantomime of the silent screen, and from having a kindred soul to laugh with. ~ 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

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. ~ Eudora Welty

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

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. ~ Eudora Welty

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel. ~ Eudora Welty

It might be if he had not appeared the way he did appear that day she would never have looked so closely at him, but the time people come makes a difference. ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

Write about what you don't know about what you know. ~ Eudora Welty

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

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

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive. ~ Eudora Welty