Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
Eudora WeltyRead
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of listening as a foundational skill for understanding stories and participating in storytelling.
Eudora Welty highlights the role of listening in the art of storytelling, illustrating how children, by actively listening, engage with narratives even before they can tell their own stories. This act of anticipation and awareness shows that listening is a vital part of learning and participating in the rich tradition of sharing stories, revealing a deeper understanding of the world around them.
Themes
ListeningStoriesEducationParticipationChildren
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a workshop about storytelling for educators to stress the importance of listening.
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.
Eudora WeltyRead
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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