All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a…

“She (my mother) could still recite them (the poems) in full when she was lying helpless and nearly blind, in her bed, an old…

— 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…

— 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 say on the…

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

“When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.”

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

“At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.”

— Eudora Welty

“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to…

— Eudora Welty

“Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?”

— Eudora Welty

“When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we wrote notes to each other perhaps…

— Eudora Welty

“She (my mother) stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look…

— Eudora Welty

“For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.”

— Eudora Welty

“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…

— Eudora Welty

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

— Eudora Welty

“When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted,…

— Eudora Welty