Quotes from Eudora Welty

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.

At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.

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.

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.

The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

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.

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.

Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?

For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Welcome! I said—the most dangerous word in the world.

Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.

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.

When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.

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.

In the end, it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine.

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.

I've said what I had to say.

But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again -- but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it's vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.

For he was not strong enough to receive the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to break their fall.

And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.

It was in a place where the days would go by and surprise anyone that they were over.

He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.