Eudora Welty Quotes

93 quotes in 1287 categories

• Beware of a man with manners.
• 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…
• 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.
• Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation.
• Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its…
• To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too,…
• There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see…
• Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't…
• What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
• A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood.…
• When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they…
• The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
• To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
• 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…
• Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
• No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
• For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
• 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 page…
• The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.
• I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.

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