Listening - One Writer's Beginnings - Chpt 1 — Vocabulary
Eudora Welty
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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

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.†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.†

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.†2 more

The cadence, whatever it is that asks you tobelieve, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice.†1 more

All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice.†1 more

EVANGELISTS visited Jackson then; along with the Red-path Chautauqua and political speakings, they seemed to be part of August.†1 more

It was tightly closed, but I opened it, to find to my puzzlement and covetousness two polished buffalo nickels, embedded in white cotton.†1 more

For one thing, simply as a fiction writer, I am minus an adversary—except, of course, that of time—and for another thing, the act of writing in itself brings me happiness.†

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.†

It made him lastingly righteous so that he knew just what to say in the Jackson Daily News when one of our fellow Mississippians had the unmitigated gall to publish, and expect other Mississippians to read, a book like Sanctuary.†

He pointed out that everything in life had been made for the convenience of right-handed people, because they were the majority, and he often used "what the majority wants" as a criterion for what was for the best.†

With a swing of her bell that took her whole right arm and shoulder, she rang it, militant and impartial, from the head of the front steps of Davis School when it was time for us all to line up, girls on one side, boys on the other.†

It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling often attaches itself to a procession.†

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

But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me.†

She could do whatever her hands were doing without having to stop talking; and she could speak in a wonderfully derogatory way with any number of pins stuck in her mouth.†

The gist of her tale would be lost on me, but Fannie didn't bother about the ear she was telling it to; she just liked telling.†

She emerges in my perhaps inordinate number of schoolteacher characters.†

Here to help us grow up arguing around the diningroom table were the Unabridged Webster, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, the Lincoln Library of Information, and later the Book of Knowledge.†