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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

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
Listened
Wrote
Fiction
Stories
Long

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Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
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Beware of a man with manners.
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One place understood helps us understand all places better
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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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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.
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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.
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Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
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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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For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
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I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
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Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
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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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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.
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Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.
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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.
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
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