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

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
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Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.
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Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
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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.
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I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
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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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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Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
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Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.
Eudora Welty
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
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Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
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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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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One place understood helps us understand all places better
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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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.
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There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
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I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
Eudora Welty