Eudora Welty Quotes

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than...

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet a...

It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his...

The thing that seemed like silence must have been the endless cry of all the crickets and locusts in...

And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house...

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

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

The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the st...

A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmt...

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

In children's art class we sat in a ring of kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had ju...

People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes t...

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time but in their significance to ourselves they f...

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause...

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

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

Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and disc...

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world it was through travel that I found my own i...

Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart ...

All serious daring starts from within.

But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonel...

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by peopl...

Out of love you can speak with straight fury.

It was entirely taken for granted that there wasn't any lying in our family, and I was advanced in a...

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say w...

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, t...

I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely t...

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause...

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instructi...

On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing ...

That summer lying in the long grass with my head propped up against the back of a saddle, with the z...

It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if...

There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson,...

A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began writing stories: getting my distance, a prerequ...

Through learning at my later date things I hadn't known, or had escaped or possibly feared realizing...

When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we ...

In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entert...

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emot...

The journey took about a week each way, and each day had my parents both in its grip. Riding behind ...

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words u...

What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the ge...

Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read th...

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the ...

I didn't hit other people or hit purposefully, I just hit. Some object would be at fault. My anger w...

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

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than...

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my dec...

It was examinations (in school) that drove my wits away, as all emergencies do. Being expected to me...

I can't think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother E...

She (my mother) could still recite them (the poems) in full when she was lying helpless and nearly b...

Our Victrola stood in the diningroom. I was allowed to climb onto the seat of a diningroom chair to ...

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

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

It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, ...

Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" sin...

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along ...

I've always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including ...

My father knew our way mile by mile; by day or by night, he knew where we were. Everything that chan...

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us h...

It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling often attaches itself to a procession. In films and st...

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in lov...

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see...

Taking trips tore all of us up inside, for they seemed, each journey away from home, something that ...

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they fi...

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

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never h...

On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the sh...

I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a sym...

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

She (my mother) stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed...

Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycl...

It seems likely to me now that the very element in my character that took possession of me there on ...

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all...

Human life is fiction's only theme.

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, r...

The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy t...

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the in...

All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Child...

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by peopl...