EWEudora Welty

81 collected words

Eudora Welty

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me.

Eudora Welty / quote

02Undated

On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. 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. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.

Eudora Welty / quote

03Undated

She (my mother) stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look dangerous, and so it had been to her. A way had to be found around her love sometimes, without challenging that, and at the same time cherishing it in its unassailable strength. Each of us children did, sooner or later, in part at least, solve this in different, respectful, complicated ways.

Eudora Welty / quote

04Undated

Taking trips tore all of us up inside, for they seemed, each journey away from home, something that might have been less selfishly undertaken, or something that would test us, or something that had better be momentous, to justify such a leap into the dark. The torment and guilt - the torment of having the loved one go, the guilt of being the loved one gone - comes into my fiction as it did and does in my life. And most of all the guilt then was because it was true: I had left to arrive at some future and secret joy, at what was unknown, and what was no in New York, waiting to be discovered. My joy was connected with my writing; that was as much as I knew.

Eudora Welty / quote

05Undated

In children's art class we sat in a ring of kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off wiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell of the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson - as shouldn't it be? Children, like animals use all their sense to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again. Here and there, it's the same world. Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never lost it.

Eudora Welty / quote

06Undated

When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we wrote notes to each other perhaps on the hour. Our devoted mother would pass them for us, after first running them in a hot oven to kill the germs. They came into our hands curled up and warm, sometimes scorched like toast.

Eudora Welty / quote

07Undated

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.

Eudora Welty / quote

08Undated

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

Eudora Welty / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

Art, though, 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; in particular, the novel.

Eudora Welty / quote

11Undated

Human life is fiction's only theme.

Eudora Welty / quote

12Undated

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, or strives to endure.

Eudora Welty / quote

13Undated

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. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. 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. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.

Eudora Welty / quote

14Undated

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.

Eudora Welty / quote

15Undated

The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

Eudora Welty / quote

16Undated

The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words - there's so much more of life that only words can convey - strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer's direction from the start, not a photographer's or a recorder's.

Eudora Welty / quote

17Undated

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.

Eudora Welty / quote

18Undated

Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.

Eudora Welty / quote

19Undated

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 / quote

20Undated

My father knew our way mile by mile; by day or by night, he knew where we were. Everything that changed under our eyes, in the flying countryside, was the known world to him, the imagination to me. Each in our own way, we hungered for all this: my father and I were in no other respect or situation so congenial.

Eudora Welty / quote

21Undated

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

Eudora Welty / quote

22Undated

I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer had any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience. Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory - the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing - it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives - the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

Eudora Welty / quote

23Undated

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.

Eudora Welty / quote

24Undated

It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening.("Death of a Traveling Salesman")

Eudora Welty / quote