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Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

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
Life
Human
Inside
Suspects
Humans
Becomes
Page
Take
Write
Entirely
Right
Another
Skin
Sometimes
Character
Skins
Writing
Persons
Luck
Heart
Soul
Pages
Mind
Person
Characters
Suspect

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
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Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.
Eudora Welty
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Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
Eudora Welty
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No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
Eudora Welty
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Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Eudora Welty
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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
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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty
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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty
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Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation.
Eudora Welty
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For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
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Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Eudora Welty
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Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty
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There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.
Eudora Welty
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To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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
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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