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Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes

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Famous Eudora Welty Quotes

“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.”

KnowsChildrenLongStoriesFormWaitingListeningGoes OnHolesStorytellingMiceParticipationEldersWaiting And Hoping
Book:One Writer's Beginnings
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“I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.”

ImportantBookHomeHouseWishSeaMinutesTasteThousandTwentiesLibraryGrantedLeagueBlissBrownCampsBicycleRushingBasketsBunniesLibrary BooksDevouring
Author:Eudora Welty
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“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?”

WayWritingMindHeartMayAsksBornPoorBlessingPagesLastingInstructionHeart And Mind
Book:On Writing
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“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.”

PeopleKnowsGivingLittlesEnoughMomentsMightGivenImaginationWonderCasesTroublePraiseBlessedSpinningCursedAstonishmentBeing Blessed
Author:Eudora Welty
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“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.”

RememberMovingLinesFictionJourneyFieldsMeetingsDramaticInwardRespecting OthersStraight Lines
Author:Eudora Welty
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“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.”

IfsArtRealSelfRealityTurnsResponsibilityVisionNovelAchieveReaderPagesIllusionCapacityLonelyPracticalsImpressionReceivingSensitivityObservingDistortionAssignments
Book:On Writing
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“Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.”

FeelsWritingStillsSometimesHelpingReadingFeltPiecesExpressionPersonalityRemainsFinishedPeculiarGreat Work
Book:On Writing
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“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”

WritingEndsMightCoursesNovelObjectsMaterialsReaderOffersEssenceFinishedThis LifeReportsRaw MaterialsFinished Work
Book:On Writing
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“When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.”

WayStillsSongSoundSilenceMusicMorningAirFieldsSweetListeningFitQuietBirdGreenHearingEastNoiseBitterEveningButterflyReservesInsectsFlewTurned OffDrowsyGreen Fields
Book:The Wide Net and Other Stories
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“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.”

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Author:Eudora Welty
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