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The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

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
Novelists
Correct
Neither
Comfort
Works
Told
Alive
Condone
Make
Novelist

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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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 writer's own life.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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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Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
Eudora Welty
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Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
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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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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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty
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Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
Eudora Welty
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People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
Eudora Welty
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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Eudora Welty
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My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
Eudora Welty
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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
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it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there the point is to have a destination.
Eudora Welty
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
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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
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty
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A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty