Quotes from Eudora Welty

They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant's- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights--the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers.

The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign. (The Wide Net)

For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

It is want that does the world's arousing, and if it were not for that, who knows what might not be interrupted?

Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.

A little girl lay flung back in her mother's lap as though sleep had struck her with a blow.

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing, once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

She flicked an ash into the basket of dirty towels. 'Mrs. Pike is a very decided blonde. She bought me the peanuts.' 'She must be cute,' said Mrs. Fletcher. 'Honey, cute ain't the word for what she is. I'm tellin' you, Mrs. Pike is attractive. She has her a good time. She's got a sharp eye out, Mrs. Pike has. (Petrified Man

He, who had once been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope

Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting?

I've always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go.

The thing that seemed like silence must have been the endless cry of all the crickets and locusts in the world, rising and falling. (The Wide Net)

When he got to his own house, William Wallace saw to his surprise that it had not rained at all. But there, curved over the roof, was something he had never seen before as long as he could remember, a rainbow at night. In the light of the moon, which had risen again, it looked small and of gauzy material, like a lady's summer dress, a faint veil through which the stars showed. (A Wide Net)

Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.

Making reality real is art's responsibility.

When, sometime later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.

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. ...I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them...

If reality is what looms, love is what pervades...

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.