Top 140 Eudora Welty Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Photography Quotes

2. “No art ever came out of not risking your neck.”

— Eudora Welty

3. “From the first I was clamorous to learn...”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

4. “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

— Eudora Welty

5. “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.”

— Eudora Welty

6. “All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.”

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

8. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

11. “I’m a great reader that never has time to read.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Reading Quotes

12. “Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.”

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

14. “I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”

— Eudora Welty

15. “I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.”

— Eudora Welty

16. “Location pertains to feelings – feelings are bound up in place.”

— Eudora Welty

17. “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 you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.”

— Eudora Welty

18. “The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.”

— Eudora Welty

19. “All serious daring starts from within.”

— Eudora Welty

20. “One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.”

— Eudora Welty

21. “How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk – experiment – is a considerable part of the joy of doing.”

— Eudora Welty

22. “I was always my own teacher.”

— Eudora Welty

23. “We are the breakers of our own hearts.”

— Eudora Welty

24. “My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.”

— Eudora Welty

25. “The first act of insight is throw away the labels.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

26. “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Reading Quotes

27. “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 know but the other character does know.”

— Eudora Welty

28. “Suppose you meet me in the woods.”

— Eudora Welty

29. “Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.”

— Eudora Welty

30. “Human life is fiction’s only theme.”

— Eudora Welty

31. “I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.”

— Eudora Welty

32. “My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.”

— Eudora Welty

33. “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

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

— Eudora Welty

35. “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.”

— Eudora Welty

36. “Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.”

— Eudora Welty

37. “Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp – peace, that’s what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.”

— Eudora Welty

38. “My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Reading Quotes

39. “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.”

— Eudora Welty

40. “It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.”

— Eudora Welty

41. “Beware of a man with manners.”

— Eudora Welty

42. “It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.”

— Eudora Welty

43. “Making reality real is art’s responsibility.”

— Eudora Welty

44. “At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.”

— Eudora Welty

45. “When I read, I hear what’s on the page. I don’t know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Reading Quotes

46. “A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told – returned to the world it came out of.”

— Eudora Welty

47. “Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.”

— Eudora Welty

48. “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 my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned.”

— Eudora Welty

49. “To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.”

— Eudora Welty

50. “Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.”

— Eudora Welty

Featured in: Reading Quotes