Eudora Welty Quotes

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

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

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.

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

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.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

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.

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

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

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

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

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

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.

No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.

Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels.

One place understood helps us understand all places better

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

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 of themselves like grass.

Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.

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

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.

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

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.

Out of love you can speak with straight fury.

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.

Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.

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

People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

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

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.

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

Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.

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.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

I was always my own teacher.

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