1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes

Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. April 1909 – 23. July 2001  •  Other names یودورا ولتی, ეუდორა უელტი, יודורה ולטי
Eudora Welty photo

Works

One Writer's Beginnings
The Optimist's Daughter
Delta Wedding
Delta Wedding
Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty: 37 quotes0 likes

Famous Eudora Welty Quotes

“All serious daring starts from within.”

Eudora Welty

Source: On Writing (2002)

“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 book Delta Wedding

Source: Delta Wedding

“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

Source: On Writing

“Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers… great talkers.”

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Quotes about life

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Eudora Welty

Source: On Writing (2002)

“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

“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 these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?”

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

“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

On Writing (2002)

“Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.”

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

“Human life is fiction's only theme.”

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

Eudora Welty Quotes about people

“People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel… but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.”

Eudora Welty

“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 up of themselves like grass.”

Eudora Welty

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

Eudora Welty book The Optimist's Daughter

Source: The Optimist's Daughter

“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 up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, 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 book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

Eudora Welty Quotes

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

Eudora Welty

“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 book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)
Context: 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 up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, 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.

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”

Eudora Welty

“We are the breakers of our own hearts”

Eudora Welty

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

Eudora Welty

“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 book One Writer's Beginnings

Source: One Writer's Beginnings

“One place understood helps us understand all places better”

Eudora Welty

“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

Source: The Wide Net and Other Stories

“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

“If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?”

Eudora Welty

"Petrified Man", 1941

“Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.”

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

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

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

“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 book The Optimist's Daughter

The Optimist's Daughter(1972)

“Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.”

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

“The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do.”

Eudora Welty

On Writing (2002)

“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 early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

Similar authors

H.P. Lovecraft photo
H.P. Lovecraft203
American author None
Napoleon Hill photo
Napoleon Hill104
American author None
Stephen King photo
Stephen King733
American author None
Robert T. Kiyosaki photo
Robert T. Kiyosaki151
American finance author , investor None
John C. Maxwell photo
John C. Maxwell145
American author, speaker and pastor None
Edward Abbey photo
Edward Abbey146
American author and essayist None
Helen Keller photo
Helen Keller156
American author and political activist None
Carlos Castaneda photo
Carlos Castaneda98
Peruvian-American author None
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Hunter S. Thompson268
American journalist and author None
Patch Adams photo
Patch Adams10
Physician, activist, diplomat, author None