Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Eudora WeltyRead
Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.
Interpretation
This quote poetically illustrates the cyclical nature of storms and their impact on life, likening storms to flowers and burdens.
Eudora Welty's quote uses vivid imagery to convey the duality of storms, suggesting that they can be both beautiful and burdensome. The comparison of storm clouds to purple flowers speaks to the beauty that can be found in temporary chaos, while the notion that the storm lays down like a burden at nightfall reflects the emotional weight of experiences we carry daily.
In practice
A motivational speaker might use this quote to emphasize resilience in the face of adversity.
Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
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.
A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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.
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 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.
In the other gardens_x000D_ _x000D_ And all up the vale,_x000D_ _x000D_ From the autumn bonfies_x000D_ _x000D_ See the smoke trail!_x000D_ _x000D_ Pleasant summer over_x000D_ _x000D_ And all the summer flowers,_x000D_ _x000D_ The red fire blazes,_x000D_ _x000D_ the grey smoke towers._x000D_ _x000D_ Sing a song of seasons!_x000D_ _x000D_ Something bright in all,_x000D_ _x000D_ Flowers in the summer_x000D_ _x000D_ Fires in the fall!
And out of darkness came the hands that reach through nature, moulding men.
I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.
O cricket from your cherry cry_x000D_ _x000D_ No one would ever guess_x000D_ _x000D_ How quickly you must die.
The facts of nature cannot in the long run be violated. Penetrating and seeping through everything like water, they will undermine any system that fails to take account of them, and sooner or later they will bring about its downfall. But an authority wise enough in its statesmanship to give sufficient free play to nature - of which spirit is a part - need fear no premature decline.
Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a power which are not its own.
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