261 Quotes by Eudora Welty

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.

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

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.

And yet Laura could see that they changed every moment. The outside did not change but the inside did; an iridescent life was busy within and under each alikeness.

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

Passion is our ground, our island – do others exist?

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about – these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.

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

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