110+ Eudora Welty Quotes On Writing, Imaginative And Insightful

Eudora Welty was an American author from Jackson, Mississippi. She wrote short stories, novels, and essays. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973 for her novel The Optimist's Daughter. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Eudora Welty on writing, life, imaginative.

Top 10 Eudora Welty Quotes

1. A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
2. The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
3. Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.
7. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
8. Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
9. All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
10. 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.

Eudora Welty Short Quotes

• I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.
• Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
• Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
• Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
• Never think you've seen the last of anything.
• Beware of a man with manners.
• I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
• Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
• A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
• Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Eudora Welty Quotes About Writing

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

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures. — Eudora Welty

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards. — Eudora Welty

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

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

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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. — Eudora Welty

Human life is fiction's only theme. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes About Imaginative

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. — Eudora Welty

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

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. — Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes About People

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. — Eudora Welty

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

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. — Eudora Welty

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

Eudora Welty Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Eudora Welty

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified! — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

The very greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself. — Eudora Welty

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together. — Eudora Welty

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

Making reality real is art's responsibility. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

Suppose you meet me in the woods. — Eudora Welty

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

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 — Eudora Welty

One place understood helps us understand all places better — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Write about what you don't know about what you know. — Eudora Welty

A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts. — Eudora Welty

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

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

We are the breakers of our own hearts — Eudora Welty

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

Plots are ... what the writer sees with. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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. — Eudora Welty

Don't give anybody up." He stroked her. "Or leave anybody out. Me and you both left her out today, and I'm ashamed for us." "There just wasn't room in today for it ... He said, "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." — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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. — Eudora Welty

What we know about writing the novel is the novel. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written. — Eudora Welty

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

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. — Eudora Welty

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

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

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. — Eudora Welty

[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

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

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

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. — Eudora Welty

I was always my own teacher. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity. — Eudora Welty

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

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. — Eudora Welty

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? — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. — Eudora Welty

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

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. — Eudora Welty

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist? — Eudora Welty

Life Lessons by Eudora Welty

1. Eudora Welty emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating the beauty of life's small moments. She encourages readers to take the time to observe and appreciate the beauty of the world around them.
2. She also emphasizes the importance of human connection, encouraging readers to take the time to appreciate the relationships they have with others and to be open to forming new ones.
3. Lastly, Welty emphasizes the power of storytelling as a way to connect with others and to make sense of the world. She encourages readers to take the time to tell their own stories and to listen to the stories of others.