Eudora Welty Quotes

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

Human life is fiction's only theme.

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.

Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.

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

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.

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

The very greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself.

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

Beware of a man with manners.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

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

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.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

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

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

Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

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

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

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

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

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

Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

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

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

When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

Suppose you meet me in the woods.

Making reality real is art's responsibility.

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

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

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

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.

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

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

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

Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

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.

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

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

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

Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

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")

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

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

Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.