(1909–2001)
U.S. author
Eudora Welty
Though I was always waked for eclipses, and indeed carried to the window as an infant in arms and shown Halley’s Comet in my sleep, and though I’d been taught at our diningroom table about the solar system and knew the earth revolved around the sun, and our moon around us, I never found out the moon didn’t come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell, the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said valuable words to me about my new profession: “Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky.”
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10–11.
Daddy made for us himself elaborate kites that needed to be taken miles out of town to a pasture long enough (and my father was not afraid of horses and cows watching) for him to run with and get up on a long cord to which my mother held the spindle, and then we children were given it to hold, tugging like something alive at our hands. They were beautiful, sound, shapely box kites, smelling delicately of office glue for their entire short lives.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4–5.
The boys working on the house are named Calvin, Ronnie, and Earl, who’re under a contractor named Jesse Parrish. They sing hymns from ladder tops, and keep buttermilk and Rainbo Pickles in my refrigerator.
Letter to William Maxwell, October 23, 1972, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 295.
In a children’s art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson—as shouldn’t it be? Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 9–10.
I’m so used to writing with a pincushion that I don’t know if I can learn other ways or not, but I did go right down and buy a bottle of Carter’s [rubber cement]. The smell stimulates the mind and brings up dreams of efficiency. Long ago when my stories were short (I wish they were back) I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance—helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that’s when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction…. The Ponder Heart [novella originally published in the New Yorker in 1953] was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles, and when I got through typing it out I had more pins than I started with. (So it’s economical.)
Letter to William Maxwell, September 10, 1953, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 41–42.
I am glad you thought the new story all of a piece. It was a supreme effort, really, that I made to have it so, but I thought the odds were against me, and felt worn out and depressed afterwards. If there was any way to get the envelope back out of the slot in the post-office after mailing, like with a long hook and a string—you would never get a story, though I will race down in the middle of the night, I’m so anxious to put it in.
April 23, 1942 letter to her agent, Diarmuid Russell, in Author and Agent, by Michael Kreyling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 89.
Nothing looks more disheveled than a thoroughly rained-on redbird, do you think? I’m looking at one. (He’s looking at me.)
Letter to William Maxwell dated January 8, 1968, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 237.
Knowing about a good story you haven’t read is like watching for a comet.
Letter to William Maxwell, Spring 1957, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Marrs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 110.
What you look for in the world is not simply for what you want to know, but for more than you want to know, and more than you can know, better than you had wished for, and sometimes something draws you to a discovery and there is no other happiness quite the same.
Letter to her agent Diarmuid Russell, reply to Russell’s Sept. 30, 1941 letter, in Author and Agent, by Michael Kreyling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 11.
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.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 14.
Of course it’s easy to see why they both overprotected me, why my father, before I could wear a new pair of shoes for the first time, made me wait while he took out his thin silver pocket knife and with the point of the blade scored the polished soles all over, carefully, in a diamond pattern, to prevent me from sliding on the polished floor when I ran.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 18–19.
Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.
One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 84.