Eudora Welty quotes

Eudora Welty was an acclaimed American author and photographer, celebrated for her short stories and novels set in the American South. Her works explore themes of human relationships, community, and the complexities of everyday life. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is remembered as one of the most influential Southern writers. Here are 45 of her quotes:

I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

Eudora Welty

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

Eudora Welty

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

All serious daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Eudora Welty

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

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

Eudora Welty

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Eudora Welty

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

Eudora Welty

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.

Eudora Welty

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

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

Eudora Welty

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

Eudora Welty

Human life is fiction's only theme.

Eudora Welty

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

Eudora Welty

Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

Eudora Welty

Write about what you don't know about what you know.

Eudora Welty

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Eudora Welty

One place understood helps us understand all places better.

Eudora Welty

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

Eudora Welty

We are the breakers of our own hearts.

Eudora Welty