One Writer's Beginnings — Vocabulary
Eudora Welty
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And in the parlor where the blinds were drawn, the smell of being unvisited would pervade, pervade, pervade.†

I had the feeling even in my heedless childhood that this was the only book my father as a little boy had had of his own.†2 more

Our road always became her adversary.†1 more

Direction itself was made beautiful, momentous.†1 more

And of course, as soon as the boys attained anywhere near the right age, there was an electric train, the engine with its pea-sized working headlight, its line of cars, tracks equipped with switches, semaphores, its station, its bridges, and its tunnel, which blocked off all other traffic in the upstairs hall.†1 more

I read straight through his other love-from-afar: the Victrola Book of the Opera, with opera after opera in synopsis, with portraits in costume of Melba, Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Geraldine Farrar, some of whose voices we could listen to on our Red Seal records.†3 more

She also proposed a spelling match between the fourth grade at Davis School and the Mississippi Legislature, who went through with it; and that told the Legislature.†3 more

Such were my mother's component parts.†1 more

But she persisted with me, as she persisted in spite of herself with the other characters in the stories.†2 more

Here are the rich boy and the poor boy and Mr. Barlow, their teacher and interlocutor, in long discourses alternating with dramatic scenes—danger and rescue allotted to the rich and the poor respectively.†2 more

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.†1 more

You're a good deal of a pessimist, sweetheart.†1 more

EVANGELISTS visited Jackson then; along with the Red-path Chautauqua and political speakings, they seemed to be part of August.†2 more

Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together.†2 more

It seems to me, writing of my parents now in my seventies, that I see continuities in their lives that weren't visible to me when they were living.†2 more

Each in our own way, we hungered for all of this: my father and I were in no other respect or situation so congenial.†1 more

These stories were all related (and the fact was buried in their inceptions) by the strongest ties—identities, kinships, relationships, or affinities already known or remembered or foreshadowed.†

The doctor made a disparaging sound with his lips, the kind a woman knitting makes when she drops a stitch.†

An opulence of story books covered my bed; it was the "Land of Counterpane."†

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, butin their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological.†