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

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.
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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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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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty
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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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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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Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
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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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
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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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.
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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One place understood helps us understand all places better
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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No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
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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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Eudora Welty
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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
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The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
Eudora Welty