Eudora Welty Quotes
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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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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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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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Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
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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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A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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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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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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I was always my own teacher.
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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 mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
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I'm a great reader that never has time to read.