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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 of themselves like grass.
Eudora Welty
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Eudora Welty
Age: 102 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 13
Died: 2011
Died: July 23
Author
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Photographer
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Eudora Alice Welty
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More quotes by Eudora Welty
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
Eudora Welty
When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
Eudora Welty
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Eudora Welty
The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again
Eudora Welty
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
Eudora Welty
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Eudora Welty
Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Eudora Welty
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
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty
My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.
Eudora Welty
Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Eudora Welty
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
Eudora Welty
A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.
Eudora Welty
To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
Eudora Welty
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Eudora Welty
The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty
A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
Eudora Welty