“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?”
On Writing (2002)
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Eudora Welty 37
American author 1909–2001Related quotes
“You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“We cannot tear a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.”
Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu.
Source: Mauprat, ch. 11 (1837); Matilda M. Hays (trans.) Mauprat (London: E. Churton, 1847) p. 121

Letter to http://www.sappho.com/letters/vitas-w.html Violet Trefusis (3 September 1950), published in The Other Woman : A Life of Violet Trefusis, including previously unpublished correspondence with Vita Sackville-West (1985) edited by Philippe Jullian and John Nova Phillips, p. 235
Context: It was a real event in my life and my heart to be with you the other day. We do matter to each other, don't we? however much our ways may have diverged. I think we have got something indestructible between us, haven't we? … It has been a very strange relationship, ours; unhappy at times, happy at others; but unique in its way, and infinitely precious to me and (may I say?) to you.
What I like about it is that we always come together again however long the gaps in our meetings may have been. Time seems to make no difference.

2009, A New Beginning (June 2009)

Excerpts from speech given at UCSC's 20th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Convocation. (January 20, 2004) http://currents.ucsc.edu/03-04/01-26/king.html
2000s

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)
Context: We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.