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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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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
Character
Exactly
Everything
Meet
Writing
City
Overhear
Would
Cities
Bus
Story
Apply
Stories
Wherever
Part
Page
Seems
Pages

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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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 writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
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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.
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Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Eudora Welty
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Don't give anybody up. He stroked her. Or leave anybody out. Me and you both left her out today, and I'm ashamed for us. There just wasn't room in today for it ... He said, There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help.
Eudora Welty
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One place understood helps us understand all places better
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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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
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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
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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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
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 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.
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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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
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Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
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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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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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