Eudora Welty Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Eudora Welty Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
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.
Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.
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.
To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
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.
One place understood helps us understand all places better
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
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")
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.
Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.
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.
I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
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.
Well, honey, what Mrs. Pike liked was the pygmies. They've got these pygmies down there, too, an' Mrs. Pike was just wild about 'em. You know, the teeniniest men in the universe? Well, honey, they can just rest back on their little bohunkus an' roll around an' you can't hardly tell if they're sittin' or standin'. That'll give you some idea. They're about forty-two years old. Just suppose it was your husband!'
("Petrified Man")
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.
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.
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.
The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
As soon as a man stopped wandering
and stood still an looked around him,
he found a god in that place.
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.
Don't give anybody up ... or leave anybody out ... There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help.
Spoken by Jack to Gloria
He was surprised at the way she answered. She had taken a long time to say that. She had nodded her head in a deep way too. Had she wished to affect him with some sort of premonition? He wondered unhappily. Or was it only that she would not help him, after all, by talking with him? For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall. He had lived a month in which nothing had happened except in his head and his body - an almost inaudible life of heartbeats and dreams that came back, a life of fever and privacy, a delicate life which had left him weak to the point of - what? Of begging. The pulse in his palm leapt like a trout in a brook.
("Death of a Traveling Salesman")
Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers ... great talkers.
I've said what I had to say.
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.
He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Human life is fiction's only theme.
It doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
He loved happiness like I love tea.
I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me
and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting
into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school.
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In "Once upon a time," an "o" had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.
She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
Welcome!" I said - the most dangerous word in the world.
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")
At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.
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.
The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.
When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.
Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
Beware of a man with manners.
Both reading and writing are experiences
lifelong
in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
It's our turn! she'd thought exultantly. And we're going to live forever.
Just now they kissed, with India coming up close on her toes to see if she could tell yet what there was about a kiss.
All serious daring starts from within.
Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.
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?
People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.
[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.
![Eudora Welty Sayings: [William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange,](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/eudora-welty-sayings-1422584.jpg "Eudora Welty Sayings: [William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange,")
Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery ... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.
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.
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 a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.
Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way ... Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.
Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest.
It was entirely taken for granted that there wasn't any lying in our family, and I was advanced in adolescence before I realized that in plenty of homes where I played with schoolmates, and went to their parties, children lied to their parents and parents lied to their children and to each other. It took me a long time to realize that these very same everyday lies, and the stratagems and jokes and tricks and dares that went with them, were in fact the basis of the scenes I so well loved to hear about and hoped for and treasured in the conversation of adults. My instinct - the dramatic instinct - was to lead me, eventually, on the right track for a storyteller: the scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions, and promises of things to find out and know about human beings.I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken - and to know a truth, I also had to recognize a lie.
For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.
I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
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.
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.
It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening.
("Death of a Traveling Salesman")
She would like to tell him some strange beautiful thing, if she could speak at all, something to make him speak. Communication would be telling something that is all new, so as to have more of the new told back.
When he got to his own house, William Wallace saw to his surprise that it had not rained at all. But there, curved over the roof, was something he had never seen before as long as he could remember, a rainbow at night. In the light of the moon, which had risen again, it looked small and of gauzy material, like a lady's summer dress, a faint veil through which the stars showed.
("A Wide Net")
He's blind, and nearly deaf in the bargain," Mrs. Martello said proudly. "And he's going in surgery just as soon as they get him all fixed up for it. He's got a malignancy.
I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other
In the end, it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine.
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?
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.
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
By the essence of their nature, which was frail, all human beings were probably doomed to be seasick.
And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house. The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger. It was necessary to do what? ... to talk.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")
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.
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
Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
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.
It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique
its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it
a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.
