Through learning at my later date things I hadn't known, or had escaped or possibly feared realizing, about my parents - and myself - I glimpsed our whole family life as if it were freed of that clock time which spaces us apart so inhibitingly, divides young and old, keeps our living through the same experiences at separate distances. It is our inward journey that leads us through time - forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction. Eudora Welty
About This Quote

In “Through Learning at My Later Date,” John Cheever uses a device called a "flashback." When a writer uses this device, the reader is taken back in time to a scene where the main character has experienced a particular event. In this case, Cheever takes us back to the summer that he was 10 years old and experiences a conversation with his father. In this conversation, Cheever talks about being called out of class by his mother because she believed he had been playing hooky from school. He wasn't actually playing hooky from school but rather was taking a nap in the classroom. The fact that he found it necessary to lie to his mother shows how far he had fallen in maturity.

When his father arrives, Cheever recounts how his father had asked him if he had been sleeping. The fact that Cheever's father had caught him lying to his mother shows how much he still believed in family values.

Source: On Writing

Some Similar Quotes
  1. It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. - Unknown
  2. It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays. - Audrey Niffenegger
  3. It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing. - Audrey Niffenegger
  4. Top 15 Things Money Can’t BuyTime. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity. - Roy T. Bennett
  5. One day spent with someone you love can change everything. - Mitch Albom
More Quotes By Eudora Welty
  1. The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
  2. Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
  3. I didn't hit other people or hit purposefully, I just hit. Some object would be at fault. My anger was at myself, every time, all vanity. As an adolescent I was a slammer of drawers and a packer of suitcases. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>I was responsible...
  4. 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 come from, I cannot remember a time when I...
  5. 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...
Related Topics