Finding a Voice - One Writer's Beginnings - Chpt 3 — Vocabulary
Eudora Welty
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Direction itself was made beautiful, momentous.†1 more

Right along with the energetic practice of optimism, and deeper than this, was an abiding awareness of mortality itself—most of all the mortality of a parent.†1 more

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.†2 more

But of course it was not the same experience: what was new to me, not older than ten, was a landmark to him.†2 more

She did indeed hold a recital of her pupils every June that was a fair model for Miss Eckhart's, and of many another as well, I suppose.†2 more

She would have responded to the ardency of their beliefs.†1 more

Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact.†1 more

It was also he who expressed his reservations that I wouldn't achieve financial success by becoming a writer, a sensible fear; nevertheless he fitted me out with my first typewriter, my little red Royal Portable, which I carried off to the University of Wisconsin.†

I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy istoo strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close—those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love—do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story.†

Who knows but that this ambition for the betterment of mankind in the attainable future was the quality in them both that she loved first?†

Now the whole assembly—some of it still in the future—fell, by stages, into place in one location already evoked, which I saw now was a focusing point for all the stories.†

This lamented that five of our freshman class got drowned when the waters rose, but by this Act of God, it went on, there was that much more room now for the rest of us.†

From story to story, connections between the characters' lives, through their motives or actions, sometimes their dreams, already existed: there to be found.†

Strangely enough, what Ned Andrews had extolled too, in all his rhetoric, was the future works of man and the leaving of the past behind.†

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

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

Annihilating those miles between them—the miles I came along to travel with him, that first time on the train—those miles he knew nearly altogether by heart, he wrote more often than any once a day, and mailed his letters directly onto the mail car—letters that are so ardent, so direct and tender in expression, so urgent, that they seemed to bare, along with his love, the rest of his whole life to me.†

It did not matter to me what I looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been revealed to me—for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment.†

It's the story of a middle-aged man who'd come from a farm in the Middle West, who's taciturn and unhappy as a teacher of linguistics and now has reached a critical point in his life.†