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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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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
Mean
Show
Eventually
Great
Experience
Actions
Years
Action
Behavior
Good
Feelings
Novel
Shows
Fiction
May
Year
Feel
Face
Initiate
Feels
Faces
Conduct

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
Eudora Welty
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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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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Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
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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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
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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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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
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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
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.
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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I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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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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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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
Eudora Welty
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A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty