Literary Birthday – 13 April – Eudora Welty

Quotes

1. A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.
2. 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.
3. Human life is fiction’s only theme.
4. Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.
8. 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.
9. The novel is time’s child. The novelist can never do otherwise than work with time, and nothing in his novel can escape it.
10. 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.
11. If you haven’t surprised yourself, you haven’t written.

Eudora Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

Source for image: Anonymous Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eudora-Welty-1962.jpeg

 by Amanda Patterson

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