Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

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.

We are born knowing death.

who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story.

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.

Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.

You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.

I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.

Death is loneliness in its purest form.

I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore.

Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.

I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.

What we need is endless courage.

We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

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.

The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.

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.

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.

words can never get at the truth.

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.

There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.

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.

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.

Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.

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.

I work whenever I'm let.

I always write a story in one sitting.

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.

I can pray better when I'm comfortable.

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.

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.

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.

we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.

I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness.

[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.

Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather.

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you.

It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.