Quote

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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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
Writing
Feelings
Endure
Prophetic
Moments
Memory
Ephemeral
Art
Awareness
Empowered
Shows
Fiction
Served
Past
Memories
Sharp
Light
Present
Mortal
Wells
Feeling
Strongly
Aroused
Well
Moment
Mortals
Endures

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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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
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Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
Eudora Welty
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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
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Through travel I first became aware of the outside world it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
Eudora Welty
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To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
Eudora Welty
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Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
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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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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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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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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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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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
Eudora Welty
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Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
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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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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Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty
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I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
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No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
Eudora Welty
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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.
Eudora Welty
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Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Eudora Welty