Top 140 Eudora Welty Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.”

— Eudora Welty

102. “Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.”

— Eudora Welty

103. “It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again – but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.”

— Eudora Welty

104. “He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.”

— Eudora Welty

105. “What we know about writing the novel is the novel.”

— Eudora Welty

106. “I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.”

— Eudora Welty

107. “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 in the afternoons. My sense of making fictional comedy undoubtedly first caught its spark from the antic pantomime of the silent screen, and from having a kindred soul to laugh with.”

— Eudora Welty

108. “I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters.”

— Eudora Welty

109. “Passion is our ground, our island – do others exist?”

— Eudora Welty

110. “The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.”

— Eudora Welty

111. “It is want that does the world’s arousing, and if it were not for that, who knows what might not be interrupted?”

— Eudora Welty

112. “For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.”

— Eudora Welty

113. “The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about – these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.”

— Eudora Welty

114. “Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.”

— Eudora Welty

115. “But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”

— Eudora Welty

116. “It’s our turn! she’d thought exultantly. And we’re going to live forever.”

— Eudora Welty

117. “On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on.”

— Eudora Welty

118. “I’ve always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go.”

— Eudora Welty

119. “There was a deep boom, like the rolling in of an ocean wave. The hearse door had been slammed shut.”

— Eudora Welty

120. “For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”

— Eudora Welty

121. “Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.”

— Eudora Welty

122. “I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”

— Eudora Welty

123. “When, sometime later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.”

— Eudora Welty

124. “Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears.”

— Eudora Welty

125. “It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.”

— Eudora Welty

126. “And yet Laura could see that they changed every moment. The outside did not change but the inside did; an iridescent life was busy within and under each alikeness.”

— Eudora Welty

127. “Don’t want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.”

— Eudora Welty

128. “I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together,” he said. “I like to see a thing finished.”

— Eudora Welty

129. “Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.”

— Eudora Welty

130. “They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant’s- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights – the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers.”

— Eudora Welty

131. “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 the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”

— Eudora Welty

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

— Eudora Welty

133. “It’s the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique – its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story’s challenge and the work that rises to meet it – a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.”

— Eudora Welty

134. “He, who had once been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope.”

— Eudora Welty

135. “It was never dark enough, the enormous sky flashing with August light rushing into the emptiest rooms, the loneliest windows. The month of falling stars.”

— Eudora Welty

136. “If reality is what looms, love is what pervades...”

— Eudora Welty

137. “My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible – actually a profound position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision – these set a distance.”

— Eudora Welty

138. “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 nearly so important; it comes in its own time. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.”

— Eudora Welty

139. “Grandma Ponder said,” Show me a man wears a diamond ring, and I’ll show you a wife beater.”

— Eudora Welty

140. “Barefooted on the slick brick walk I rushed to where I could breathe in the cool breath from the interior of the springhouse. On a cold bubbling spring, covered dishes and crocks and pitchers of milk and butter and so on floated in a circle in the mild whirlpool, like horses on a merry-go-round, in the water that smelled of the mint that grew close by.”

— Eudora Welty

141. “People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel.”

— Eudora Welty

142. “What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel – something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another.”

— Eudora Welty

143. “For every book here she had heard their voices, father’s and mother’s. And perhaps it didn’t matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.”

— Eudora Welty

144. “It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling often attaches itself to a procession. In films and stories we see spectacles forming in the street and parades coming from around the corner, and we know to greet then with distrust and apprehension: their intent is still to be revealed.”

— Eudora Welty

145. “They raised their voices, cried out back and forth, as if grief could be fabricated into an argument to comfort itself with.”

— Eudora Welty