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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

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
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Stories
Writing
Every
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More quotes by 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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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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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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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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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Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
Eudora Welty
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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
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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it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there the point is to have a destination.
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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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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Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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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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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My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.
Eudora Welty
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At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either I write for it, for the pleasure of it.
Eudora Welty
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Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
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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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