Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.

You waste life when you waste good food.

You shouldn't side-step suffering if you have to go through it to get where you're going.

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.

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.

What we need now is endless courage.

Each generation must get on the same old merry-go-round, only disguised in a fresh coat of paint.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

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.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

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.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.

Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.

Be respectful of words. They mean something.

God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.

Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.

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?

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

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.

Two-thirds of my energies go in trying to save one-third for work.

Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

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.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.

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.

I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand.

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.

There are so many things that 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.

Defeat in this world is no disgrace and that is what they cannot understand. If you really fought well and fought for the right thing.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Your mind outwears all sorts of things you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken away.

Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.