Quotes from 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.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

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

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

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.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

One place understood helps us understand all places better

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

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

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!

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

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.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily--perhaps not possibly--chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

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.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While" to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.