Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination. — Eudora Welty Copy Share Image
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… — Eudora Welty Copy Share Image
“She (my mother) could still recite them (the poems) in full when she was lying helpless and nearly blind, in her bed, an old lady. Reciting, her voice took on resonance and firmness, it rang with the old fervor, with ferocity even. She was teaching me one more, almost her last, lesson: emotions do not grow old. I knew that… — Eudora Welty Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't… — Eudora Welty Copy Share
“When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.” — Eudora Welty Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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… — Eudora Welty Copy Share Image
“At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.” — Eudora Welty Copy Share Image
“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to… — Eudora Welty Copy Share
“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 Copy Share Image
“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… — Eudora Welty Copy Share
