quotes by Eudora Welty

"Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading."
— Eudora Welty

"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 up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, 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. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them. . ."
— Eudora Welty

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

"The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy."
— Eudora Welty

"All serious daring starts from within"
— 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

"Suppose you meet me in the woods."
— 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 (The Wide Net And Other Stories)

""I am a writer who came froma sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.""
— Eudora Welty (On Writing (Modern Library))

""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

"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

"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 (One Writer's Beginnings (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization))

""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

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

"All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment."
— Eudora Welty (One Writer's Beginnings (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization))

"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 (One Writer's Beginnings (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization))

"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 noise of rain, of the gullies filling, of the little river leaping and running in waves filled all The Landing."
— Eudora Welty

"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

"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 (One Writer's Beginnings (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization))

"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