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Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation.
Eudora Welty -
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
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Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
Eudora Welty -
Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
Eudora Welty -
Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
Eudora Welty -
I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.
Eudora Welty -
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 -
No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
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Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
Eudora Welty -
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Eudora Welty -
My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
Eudora Welty -
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
Eudora Welty -
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 -
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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To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
Eudora Welty -
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty -
One place understood helps us understand all places better
Eudora Welty -
William Eggleston sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.
Eudora Welty -
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 -
Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
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 -
To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
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 -
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
Eudora Welty