Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose itโs 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.
Eudora WeltyWhen they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.
Eudora WeltyEvery 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 WeltyIndeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Eudora WeltyI read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from โBunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-Whileโ to โTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,โ stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isnโt nearly so important; it comes in its own time.
Eudora WeltyBut how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.
Eudora Welty