Eudora Welty Quotes
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Suppose you meet me in the woods.
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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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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
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I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.
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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.
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A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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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.
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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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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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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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The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
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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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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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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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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
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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.
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The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
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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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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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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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Beware of a man with manners.