"It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four oclock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans. (beginning of "The Purple Hat ")"
Eudora Alice Welty was an American short-story writer, novelist, and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mis
"She had been out in the rain. She stood in front of the cabin fireplace, her legs wide apart, bending over, shaking her wet yellow head crossly, like a cat reproaching itself for not knowing better. She was talking to herself-only a small fluttering sound, hard to lay hold of in the sparsity of the room. (beginning of "A Piece of News")"
"Needle in air, I stopped what I was making. From the upper casement, my look-out on the sea, I saw them disembark and find the path; I heard that whole drove of mine break loose on the beautiful strangers. I slipped down the ladder. When I heard men breathing and sandals kicking the stones, I threw open the door. A shaft of light from the zenith struck my brow, and the wind let out my hair. Something else swayed my body outward. "Welcome!" I said- the most dangerous word in the world."
"The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time."
"The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make whats told alive."
"What can place not give? Theme. It can present theme, show it to the last detail — but place is forever illustrative: it is a picture of what man has done and imagined, it is his visible past, result. Human life is fiction’s only theme. ("Place in Fiction")"
"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. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."
"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."
MouseHunt (film)"All men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive."
Theory"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances."
"The intimate rapport with nature is one of the most precious things in life. Nature is indeed very close to us; sometimes closer than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but the extension. The emotional appeal of nature is tremendous, sometimes almost more than one can bear."
Jan Smuts"Are people naturally destructive, immoral, predatory and self-seeking, only to be kept in order by harsh laws and fiercely deterrent mandatory sentences? Or are men and women naturally orderly, merciful, humane and bred with a need for justice and mutual aid? Of course these qualities, or defects, are not evenly distributed, and undoubtedly there is much of each in all of us, but when it comes to the law some sort of distinction can be drawn. Are you a Shylock or a Bassanio? Shylock pinned his faith on the words in the contract, the nature of his bond and the duty of the state to uphold the letter of the law regardless of human suffering. Bassanio put another point of view. More important than the sanctity of the law was the plight of the individual parties in the particular case."