Quotes by Eudora Welty

“Never think youve seen the last of anything.”

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order: the continuous thread of revelation.”

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

“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 writers own life.”

“Beware of a man with manners.”

“Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery...brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.”

“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 writers imagination that I set the most high.”

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

I didnt hit other people or hit purposefully, I just hit. Some object would be at fault. My anger was at myself, every time, all vanity. As an adolescent I was a slammer of drawers and a packer of suitcases. I was responsible for scenes.Control came imperfectly to all of us: we reached it at different times of life, frustrated, shot into indignation, by different things - some that are grown out of, and others not.Of all my strong emotions, anger is the one least responsible for any of my work. I dont write out of anger. For one thing, simply as a fiction writer, I am minus an adversary - except, of course, that of time - and for another thing, the act of writing in itself brings me happiness.

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 come 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. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...

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.

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.

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 writers own life.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from anothers 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?

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.

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 be read to.

I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther , that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing on a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than he changing sky.