Top 100 Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
#1. The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
Katherine Anne Porter
#2. Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter
#3. If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
Katherine Anne Porter
#5. Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing ... And never take advice, including this.
Katherine Anne Porter
#7. We have this mistaken notion that everybody in the world has to go to college. The colleges are already crowded with people who never in this world will absorb more than a rudimentary education, and we dilute everything to meet this low standard.
Katherine Anne Porter
#8. It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don't do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be.
Katherine Anne Porter
#9. Love is purely a creation of the human imagination ... the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
Katherine Anne Porter
#10. Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
Katherine Anne Porter
#11. We do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.
Katherine Anne Porter
#12. But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.
Katherine Anne Porter
#13. You are right, none of us live enough, and sometimes I think it is because we mistake hurrah and hullabaloo for experience, we get a sock in the eye and think it is a broken heart ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#14. In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.
Katherine Anne Porter
#16. Who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story.
Katherine Anne Porter
#17. Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?
Katherine Anne Porter
#18. One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex; or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.
Katherine Anne Porter
#19. The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.
Katherine Anne Porter
#20. We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don't run from the others, we are fools.
Katherine Anne Porter
#22. There seems to be a kind of order in the universe ... in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
Katherine Anne Porter
#23. Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.
Katherine Anne Porter
#24. The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else's life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.
Katherine Anne Porter
#25. There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice.
Katherine Anne Porter
#26. A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Katherine Anne Porter
#29. Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#30. I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.
Katherine Anne Porter
#31. Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.
Katherine Anne Porter
#33. People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#34. Perhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker.
Katherine Anne Porter
#35. The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#36. Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
Katherine Anne Porter
#37. With the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#38. [On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great while yet, for it is in such a limited edition, and reading it is anyhow a sort of permanent occupation.
Katherine Anne Porter
#39. Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don't be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can't face that, better not write.
Katherine Anne Porter
#40. Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.
Katherine Anne Porter
#41. I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.
Katherine Anne Porter
#42. There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.
Katherine Anne Porter
#45. Those who give the orders are not the ones to die The people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not all the same people.
Katherine Anne Porter
#47. I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.
Katherine Anne Porter
#49. Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter
#50. [From Old Mortality]
The woman in the picture ... was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.
Katherine Anne Porter
#52. Don't sidestep suffering. You have to go through it to get where you're going.
Katherine Anne Porter
#53. Nothing is mine, I have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine. Do I even walk about in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed to spare my modesty?
Katherine Anne Porter
#55. The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.
Katherine Anne Porter
#56. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
Katherine Anne Porter
#57. Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.
Katherine Anne Porter
#59. Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Katherine Anne Porter
#60. Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
Katherine Anne Porter
#61. I always knew one thing, that life is made bearable and possible and liveable by the relations of one human being to another, the individual love and gentleness between persons, or in any case, the unbreakable bond that grows and fastens lives together in all sorts of mysterious ways ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#62. Eventually women will learn there's no such thing as freedom. Their husbands are just as fastened to the deck as they are. Men get onto a treadmill and never got off.
Katherine Anne Porter
#63. The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.
Katherine Anne Porter
#64. They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Katherine Anne Porter
#67. Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.
Katherine Anne Porter
#69. Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing.
Katherine Anne Porter
#70. Your mind outwears all sorts of things you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken away.
Katherine Anne Porter
#71. You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
Katherine Anne Porter
#73. [From Pale Horse, Pale Rider]
The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . .
Katherine Anne Porter
#75. The boys ate warily, trying not to be seen or heard, the cornbread sticking, the buttermilk gurgling, as it went down their gullets.
Katherine Anne Porter
#76. There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity; and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I.
Katherine Anne Porter
#77. I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
Katherine Anne Porter
#78. I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.
Katherine Anne Porter
#79. I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind
indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.
Katherine Anne Porter
#81. [From Flowering Judas]
She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely 'a developed sense of reality'.
Katherine Anne Porter
#83. All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#84. It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.
Katherine Anne Porter
#85. The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
Katherine Anne Porter
#86. If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.
Katherine Anne Porter
#87. All that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.
Katherine Anne Porter
#89. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.
Katherine Anne Porter
#90. She wished to sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.
Katherine Anne Porter
#91. I've been called a stylist until I really could tear my hair out. And I simply don't believe in style. The style is you.
Katherine Anne Porter
#93. All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness; it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn. It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it ...
Katherine Anne Porter
#99. I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.
Katherine Anne Porter
#100. Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
Katherine Anne Porter
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