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.

Eudora Welty

Categorized in : Moving Journey Inward

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

Eudora Welty

morning positive happiness

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

veils passion fall

The first act of insight is throw away the labels.

Eudora Welty

labels understanding firsts

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. Yet regardless of where they come from, 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. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

Eudora Welty

smell reading book

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

Eudora Welty

destination matter long

One place understood helps us understand all places better

Eudora Welty

understood helping

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

Eudora Welty

layers onions people

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

snapshots lucky understanding

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

Eudora Welty

honestly can-do writing

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

Eudora Welty

diaries letters memories

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

Eudora Welty

time life order

We are the breakers of our own hearts

Eudora Welty

heart

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Eudora Welty

necks writing art

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

Eudora Welty

knows writing

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

Eudora Welty

would-be somewhere-else character

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

pain hurt people

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Eudora Welty

emotion speak stories

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

Eudora Welty

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

Eudora Welty

freedom curiosity happiness

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

Eudora Welty

snapshots photography running