Quotes from Eudora Welty

But here I am, and here I'll stay. I want the world to know I'm happy.

How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

And in a minute the loudest Yankee voice I ever heard in my life yells out, OE'm Pop-OE the Sailor-r-r-r Ma-a-an! and then somebody jumps up and down in the upstairs hall. In another second the house would of fallen down.

I was always my own teacher.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.

All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.

I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

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. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The storm had rolled away to faintness like a wagon crossing a bridge.

For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.

The events of our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

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.

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.

Write about what you don't know about what you know.