Eudora Welty

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

— Eudora Welty

“I've said what I had to say.”

— Eudora Welty

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

— Eudora Welty

The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.

— Eudora Welty

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.

— Eudora Welty

From the first I was clamorous to learn ...

— Eudora Welty

I was always my own teacher.

— Eudora Welty

A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.

— Eudora Welty

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

“Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by the knowing of their destination”

— 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

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

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

— Eudora Welty

Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.

— Eudora Welty

“But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for…

— Eudora Welty

“Don’t ever let this husband of yours, whoever he is, know you can cook, Dabney Fairchild, or you’ll spend the rest of…

— Eudora Welty

“He’s blind, and nearly deaf in the bargain,” Mrs. Martello said proudly. “And he’s going in surgery just as soon as they…

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she…

— Eudora Welty

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought:…

— Eudora Welty

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.”

— Eudora Welty

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and…

— Eudora Welty

“Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle.…

— Eudora Welty

“The crusader’s voice is the voice of the crowd and must rise louder all the time, for there is, of course, the…

— 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…

— 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…

— Eudora Welty

“For every book here she had heard their voices, father's and mother's. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what…

— Eudora Welty

“What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human…

— Eudora Welty

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility…

— Eudora Welty

“Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing…

— Eudora Welty

“His (my father's) general belief in life's well-being worked either way. 'Have you ever had it before? You have? It's not going…

— Eudora Welty

“It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if I'd…

— Eudora Welty

“It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, in…

— Eudora Welty

“There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil…

— Eudora Welty

“In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds…

— Eudora Welty

“Through learning at my later date things I hadn't known, or had escaped or possibly feared realizing, about my parents - and…

— Eudora Welty

“Like Phoenix, you work all your life to find your way, through all the obstructions and the false appearances and the upsets…

— Eudora Welty

“It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it…

— Eudora Welty