Eudora Welty

Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

What do you do after giving all your devotion to something that cannot be helped, and that has been taken away? You give all your devotion to something else that cannot be helped. But you shun all the terrible reminders, and turn not to a human being but to an idea.

"Juba, when I was in my worst trouble, I scared everybody off, did you know that? Now Im not scary any more…”

Easter never did intend to explain anything unless she had to- or to force your explanations. She just had hopes. She hoped never to be sorry.

For it was love that might always be coming, and she must watch for it this time and clasp it back while it clasped, and while it held her never let it go.

A clear love is in the world… There it was, existing there where they came and were beside it now. It is in the bubble in the water in the river, and it has its own changing and its mysteries of days and nights, and it does not care how we come and go.

My heart loves more than I can say or do, but feel no pity, only have a little vision too, of all clumsiness fallen away.

He had built a lonely house, the way he would make a cage, but it grew to be the same with him as a great monumental pyramid and sometimes in his absorption of getting it erected he was like the builder-slaves of Egypt who forgot or never knew the origin and meaning of the thing to which they gave all the strength of their bodies and used up all their days.

He knew that the best he could make would be, after it was apart from his hand, a dead thing and not a live thing, never the essence only a sum of parts

…his faith was in innocence and his knowledge was of ruin

…his eyes squinted up to them in pleading, as if to say, ‘How soon may I speak, and how soon will you pity me?’

Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

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