Eudora Welty Quotes
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The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
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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.
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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
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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
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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.
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
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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.
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Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
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Suppose you meet me in the woods.
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I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
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Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
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For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
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Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.
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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
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The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
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I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
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The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
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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.
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.