Quotes from book
One Writer's Beginnings

Name: One Writer's Beginnings
Author: Eudora Welty

One Writer's Beginnings is a collection of autobiographical essays by Eudora Welty. The book is based on three lectures she delivered at Harvard University in April 1983, as part of the William E. Massey Sr. lecture series. The three essays are entitled: Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. Well received by both critics and fans alike, One Writer's Beginnings was on The New York Times bestseller list for almost a year.In the essays, Ms. Welty explains the inescapable bond between her childhood in Mississippi and her later career as a writer. She shares details from her childhood and her relationship with her parents, Christian Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty. She discusses how these two critical relationships, and other relationships from her childhood, contributed to her literary voice. The book has been praised as revealing "the confluence of past and present as the design of Welty's life and art by making such intersection the structural principle behind her lifestory as an artist."The book includes a number of Welty family photos.

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

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

Source: One Writer's Beginnings

“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.

“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

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

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

“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)

“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)