He loved happiness like I love tea. — Eudora Welty

Out of love you can speak with straight fury. — Eudora Welty

For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives. — Eudora Welty

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

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

Human life is fiction’s only theme. — Eudora Welty

At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that. — Eudora Welty

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

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

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment. — Eudora Welty

I’m a great reader that never has time to read. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

It doesn t matter if It takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination. — Eudora Welty

Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it’s the same face the world over. — Eudora Welty

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

What we know about writing the novel is the novel. — Eudora Welty

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct. — Eudora Welty

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

Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply–what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. — Eudora Welty

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set the most high. — 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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

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

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. — Eudora Welty

Greater than scene 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. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings. — 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

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told––returned to the world it came out of. — Eudora Welty

Ah, I’m a woman that’s been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then. — Eudora Welty

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. — Eudora Welty

Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way…Or now and then we’ll hear from an artisit who’s never lost it. — Eudora Welty

William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us. — Eudora Welty