Katherine Anne Porter Quotes & Sayings

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

Advance money is really a delusion, that is to say, I get no more until it is paid out in sales, but still, living from hand to mouth and day to day as I do, a nickel in the hand is more useful than the same nickel next year. What do I know about next year? I've never been there. I don't know any one who has. — Katherine Anne Porter

Death is loneliness in its purest form ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Marriage is a public declaration of
a man and a woman that they have
formed a secret alliance, with the
intention to belong to, and share with
each other, a mystical estate; mystical
exactly in the sense that the real
experience cannot be communicated to
others, nor explained even to oneself
on rational grounds. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

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

Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I had hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back... Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, the time has come. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

The past is never where you think you left it. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

It is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy- there is always the enemy!- into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that oratory when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty. — Katherine Anne Porter

Words can never get at the truth. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

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

[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

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else. — Katherine Anne Porter

I work whenever I'm let. — Katherine Anne Porter

If we say I love you, it may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe. Say I hate you, and the one spoken to believes it instantly, once for all ... Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on. — Katherine Anne Porter

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it ... — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

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

Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

I was always restless, always a roving spirit. When I was a little child I was always running away. I never got very far, but they were always having to come and fetch me. Once when I was about six, my father came to get me somewhere I'd gone, and he told me later he'd asked me, "Why are you so restless? Why can't you stay here with us?" and I said to him, "I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand. — Katherine Anne Porter

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she meant to answer with ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization! — Katherine Anne Porter

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

[From Pale Horse, Pale Rider]

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . . — Katherine Anne Porter

You waste life when you waste good food. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Don't you love being alive?" asked Miranda. "Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?"
"I love to swim, too." said Adam.
"So do I," said Miranda, "we never did swim together. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it. — Katherine Anne Porter

There have been many times when I have been so entirely sickened of life it was very hard to work to keep on, a half dozen times I have been tempted to suicide, but I am glad I did not give way, for I have always felt that the last half of my life would somehow atone for the first half, and I still think it may ... It is not possible to live in this world without suffering unless one is a born stone. But it is also possible to have a great deal of happiness in spite of the suffering. — Katherine Anne Porter

And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in ... tiresome acrobatics ... Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step ... When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

What we need now is endless courage. — Katherine Anne Porter

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now. — Katherine Anne Porter

What we need is endless courage. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always. — Katherine Anne Porter

The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness, — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

Life comes first, an art not rooted in human experience is not worth a damn, but different kinds of minds have different kinds of experience, and all I ask of any man is validity; and there should be place for every type and kind of mind. — Katherine Anne Porter

Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather ... — Katherine Anne Porter

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. — Katherine Anne Porter

I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled ... In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

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

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

I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had - stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money ... — Katherine Anne Porter

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress. — Katherine Anne Porter

We know that the Furies do not come uninvited. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

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

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

It is such a relief to be told the truth. — Katherine Anne Porter

I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

We pity people too often for the wrong reasons. — Katherine Anne Porter

Without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty four years old each, alive and on earth at the same moment: 'Are you in the mood for dancing?' and 'I'm always in the mood for dancing, Adam!' but there were things in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go. — Katherine Anne Porter

[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

There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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