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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.

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
Throw
Understanding
Away
Firsts
First
Labels
Insight

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
Eudora Welty
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How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing.
Eudora Welty
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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
Eudora Welty
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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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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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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
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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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There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
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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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
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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
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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.
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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Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Eudora Welty
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Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
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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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
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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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Eudora Welty