Quote

The first act of insight is throw away the labels.

Eudora Welty

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Throw
Understanding
Away
Firsts
First
Labels
Insight

More quotes by Eudora Welty

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
Image
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
Image
Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Eudora Welty
Image
Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Eudora Welty
Image
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
Image
No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty
Image
I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
Eudora Welty
Image
Daydreaming had started me on the way but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
One place understood helps us understand all places better
Eudora Welty