“He loved happiness like I love tea.” ― Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart

“I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by.”
― Eudora Welty

“I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me--and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting--into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school.
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In "Once upon a time," an "o" had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.”
― Eudora Welty

“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. 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, On Writing

“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, On Writing

“For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.”
― Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart

“To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.”
― Eudora Welty

“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

“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

“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 a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.”
― Eudora Welty

“But happiness, Albert knew, is something that appears to you suddenly, that is meant for you, a thing which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”
― Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories

“At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“He loved happiness like I love tea.”
― Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart

“She would like to tell him some strange beautiful thing, if she could speak at all, something to make him speak. Communication would be telling something that is all new, so as to have more of the new told back.”
― Eudora Welty, The Wide Net and Other Stories

“You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable?"
"Well, I'm an optimist."
"I didn't know there were any more such animals," said Dr. Courtland.
"Never think you've seen the last of anything,”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?”
― Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples

“To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.”
― Eudora Welty

“For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
― Eudora Welty

“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, or strives to endure.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.”
― Eudora Welty

“The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Even as we grew up, my mother could not help imposing herself between her children and whatever it was they might take it in mind to reach out for in the world. For she would get it for them, if it was good enough for them--she would have to be very sure--and give it to them, at whatever cost to herself: valiance was in her very fibre. She stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look dangerous, and so it had been to her. A way had to be found around her love sometimes, without challenging that, and at the same time cherishing it in its unassailable strength. Each of us children did, sooner or later, in part at least, solve this in a different, respectful, complicated way.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty

“A hidden mussel was blowing bubbles like a spring through the sand where his boot was teasing the water. It was the little pulse of bubbles and not himself or herself that was the moment for her then; and he could have already departed and she could have already wept, and it would have been the same, as she stared at the little fountain rising so gently out of the shimmering sand. A clear love is in the world - this came to her as insistently as the mussel's bubbles through the water. There it was, existing there where they came and were beside it now. It is in the bubble in the water in the river, and it has its own changing and its mysteries of days and nights, and it does not care how we come and go.”
― Eudora Welty, The Wide Net and Other Stories

“I've said what I had to say.”
― Eudora Welty

“Up home we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it,” her mother used to say. “We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.”
― Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories