Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Eudora WeltyRead
I 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 “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the joy of reading and the bliss that comes from indulging in books without being overly concerned about preference.
In this quote, Eudora Welty reflects on the pure joy and excitement she experienced as a child while reading books, illustrating her passion for literature. The act of rushing home with books symbolizes a deep desire for knowledge and narrative, which she considers a form of bliss. She notes that while taste in literature develops over time, the immediate joy of reading transcends individual preferences and showcases the inherent pleasure found in simply engaging with stories.
Themes
ReadingBooksJoyBlissLiteratureChildhoodEducation
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of literacy, one could quote this to inspire children to read.
More from Eudora Welty
All quotes →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.
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A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
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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.
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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.
Eudora WeltyRead
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