Eudora Welty Quotes

Quotes about:

• The first act of insight is throw away the labels.

  Eudora Welty

  Understanding, Labels, Firsts

  16 Copy quote

• My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

  Eudora Welty

  Fall, Passion, Veils

  54 Copy quote

• One place understood helps us understand all places better

  Eudora Welty

  Helping, Understood

  15 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Long, Matter, Destination

  41 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  People, Onions, Layers

  33 Copy quote

• 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 come 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. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

  Eudora Welty

  Book, Reading, Smell

  One Writer's Beginnings ch. 1 (1983)

  61 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Positive, Happiness, Morning

  Eudora Welty (1982). “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty”, p.181, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  77 Copy quote

• We are the breakers of our own hearts

  Eudora Welty

  Heart

  Eudora Welty (1996). “One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression : a Snapshot Album”, p.11, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  41 Copy quote

• The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

  Eudora Welty

  Life, Time, Order

  1984 One Writer's Beginnings, II. 'Learning to See'.

  40 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Stories, Ends

  Eudora Welty (1950). “Short stories”

  5 Copy quote

• A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

  Eudora Welty

  Photography, Running, Snapshots

  Eudora Welty (1998). “Stories, Essays, and Memoir”

  82 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Knows

  12 Copy quote

• Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

  Eudora Welty

  Character, Somewhere Else, Would Be

  21 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eudora Welty

  Understanding, Lucky, Snapshots

  Eudora Welty (1996). “One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression : a Snapshot Album”, p.12, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  46 Copy quote

• No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

  Eudora Welty

  Art, Writing, Necks

  Eudora Welty (1998). “Stories, Essays, and Memoir”

  44 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Memories, Diaries, Letters

  48 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Art, Feelings, Able

  21 Copy quote

• One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

  Eudora Welty

  Eudora Welty (1962). “Three papers on fiction”

  31 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Lying, Use, Language

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.63, Modern Library

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Tree, Joy

  Eudora Welty (1962). “Three Papers on Fiction”

  5 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Fiction, Answers, Clear

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.78, Modern Library

  15 Copy quote

• A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

  Eudora Welty

  Happiness, Freedom, Curiosity

  1984 One Writer's Beginnings, III. 'Finding a Voice'.

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Art, Honesty

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Experience, Stories

  Eudora Welty (1995). “One Writer's Beginnings”, p.90, Harvard University Press

  16 Copy quote

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

  Eudora Welty

  Havens, Written, Ifs

  23 Copy quote

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