Eudora Welty: Place Heals the Hurt

“All serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”
― Eudora Welty

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”
― Eudora Welty

“We are the breakers of our own hearts.”
― Eudora Welty

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“It doesn't matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.”
― Eudora Welty

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
― Eudora Welty

“People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.”
― Eudora Welty

“Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“Never think you've seen the last of anything.”
― Eudora Welty

“Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.”
― Eudora Welty

“One place understood helps us understand all places better”
― Eudora Welty

“People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.”
― Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding

“She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“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

“There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.”
― Eudora Welty

“It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction. ”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings