99+ Eudora Welty Quotes on Daring, Memory and Devotion - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Eudora Welty quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Eudora Welty quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Eudora Welty wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Daring, Memory and Devotion

From the first I was clamorous to learn...

Firsts Quotes

He, who had once been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope.

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.

They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant’s- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights – the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers.

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.

Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears.

On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on.

It’s our turn! she’d thought exultantly. And we’re going to live forever.

I’ve always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go.

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together,” he said. “I like to see a thing finished.

When, sometime later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.

Don’t want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.

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 to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.

It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again – but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.

Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.

It is want that does the world’s arousing, and if it were not for that, who knows what might not be interrupted?

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn’t count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.

But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

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.

Passion is our ground, our island – do others exist?

All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Children were allowed to go without chaperone in the afternoons. My sense of making fictional comedy undoubtedly first caught its spark from the antic pantomime of the silent screen, and from having a kindred soul to laugh with.

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 to be read to.

Reading Quotes

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.

Don’t ever let this husband of yours, whoever he is, know you can cook, Dabney Fairchild, or you’ll spend the rest of your life in the kitchen. That’s the first thing I want to tell you.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

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.

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.

One place understood helps us understand all places better.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

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

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, 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.

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

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

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.

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.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Stories Quotes

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.

Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.

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

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.

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

Stories Quotes

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.

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.

Out of love you can speak with straight fury.

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.

Stories Quotes

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

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.

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

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