Life & Wisdom Quote by Eudora Welty

Welty’s line flattens the moral hierarchy we love to build between feelings. “Sorrow” and “joy” aren’t treated as opposites with separate maps; they’re destinations reached by the same kind of travel: attention, memory, willingness. The word “excursion” does a lot of sly work. It’s not a pilgrimage or a crisis, not even a “journey” with self-help grandeur. It’s an outing - deliberate, almost casual - implying that we participate in our own moods more than we admit. You don’t merely fall into grief or stumble upon happiness; you go looking.

That’s the subtext: emotion as pursuit, not weather. Welty, whose fiction is obsessed with how people narrate their lives inside small communities, suggests that our inner life runs on story-making. We choose the roads: the old photograph, the song you shouldn’t play, the mental rerun of a conversation, the version of events where you were wronged or the version where you were lucky. The mechanism is identical; the object changes.

Context matters: Welty wrote from the thick texture of the American South, where manners can blur pain into anecdote and joy into performance. Her characters often survive by turning experience into tale. The quote quietly indicts that habit while also granting it dignity. Looking for sorrow can be self-punishment, yes. It can also be courage: the decision to face what’s true. Looking for joy can be gratitude or denial. Same excursion, same risk: you might find exactly what you’re prepared to see.