Top 140 Eudora Welty Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.”

— Eudora Welty

52. “Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.”

— Eudora Welty

53. “The greatest mystery is unsheathed reality itself.”

— Eudora Welty

54. “The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive.”

— Eudora Welty

55. “If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.”

— Eudora Welty

56. “Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.”

— Eudora Welty

57. “Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t teach me how to write the next one.”

— Eudora Welty

58. “No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.”

— Eudora Welty

59. “I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.”

— Eudora Welty

60. “I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.”

— Eudora Welty

61. “The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.”

— Eudora Welty

62. “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.”

— Eudora Welty

63. “Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.”

— Eudora Welty

64. “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

65. “The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again.”

— Eudora Welty

66. “Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.”

— Eudora Welty

67. “The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.”

— Eudora Welty

68. “The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, 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

69. “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, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.”

— Eudora Welty

70. “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 it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.”

— Eudora Welty

71. “What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set the most high.”

— Eudora Welty

72. “Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.”

— Eudora Welty

73. “There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.”

— Eudora Welty

74. “For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.”

— Eudora Welty

75. “Out of love you can speak with straight fury.”

— Eudora Welty

76. “The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”

— Eudora Welty

77. “One place understood helps us understand all places better.”

— Eudora Welty

78. “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”

— Eudora Welty

79. “A little girl lay flung back in her mother’s lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.”

— Eudora Welty

80. “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

81. “She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.”

— Eudora Welty

82. “For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.”

— Eudora Welty

83. “Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.”

— Eudora Welty

84. “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.”

— Eudora Welty

85. “I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.”

— Eudora Welty

86. “My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn’t count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.”

— Eudora Welty

87. “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.”

— Eudora Welty

88. “A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.”

— Eudora Welty

89. “Don’t ever let this husband of yours, whoever he is, know you can cook, Dabney Fairchild, or you’ll spend the rest of your life in the kitchen. That’s the first thing I want to tell you.”

— Eudora Welty

90. “Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?”

— Eudora Welty

91. “To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.”

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

93. “Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.”

— Eudora Welty

94. “Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?”

— Eudora Welty

95. “The first thing we notice about our story is that we can’t really see the solid outlines of it – it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.”

— Eudora Welty

96. “Ah, I’m a woman that’s been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.”

— Eudora Welty

97. “The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.”

— Eudora Welty

98. “Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it’s the same face the world over.”

— Eudora Welty

99. “All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.”

— Eudora Welty

100. “But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”

— Eudora Welty