"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

"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

"All serious daring starts from within"
— Eudora Welty

"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)

"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

"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)

"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

""A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.""
— 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

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

"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?"
— Eudora Welty (On Writing)

"Suppose you meet me in the woods."
— 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

"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

"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."
— 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

"All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment."
— Eudora Welty (One Writer's Beginnings)

"Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by the knowing of their destination"
— Eudora Welty

"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."
— Eudora Welty

"it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination."
— 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 (The Optimist's Daughter: A Novel)

"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 Optimist's Daughter: A Novel)

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

"Never think you've seen the last of anything."
— Eudora Welty

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

"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."
— 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 came 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 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

"I've said what I had to say."
— Eudora Welty