Writer Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1909). Her mother was a schoolteacher, and Welty learned to love books before she was even able to read them. She said, "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."
She tried working in advertising but said, "It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need or really want." So she became a writer.
Though she wrote several novels, including The Optimist's Daughter (1972), she's best known for her short stories in collections such as The Wide Net (1943) and The Golden Apples (1949). She wrote and rewrote, revising her stories by cutting them apart with scissors at the dining-room table and reassembling them with straight pins.
Her story "Why I Live At the PO" begins, "I was getting along fine with Mama, Pap-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whitaker! Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking 'Pose Yourself' photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same. Stella-Rondo is exactly twelve months to the day younger than I am and for that reason she's spoiled."
A critic once asked Welty to explain where she got the idea for a marble cake in one of her stories. She replied, "It's a recipe that's been in my family for some time."
*A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
*Beware of a man with manners.
*Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
*I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
*It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
*Never think you've seen the last of anything.
*The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
*The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
*Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
*To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
*Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
*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.
*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.
No comments:
Post a Comment