110+ Katherine Anne Porter Quotes (Accurate, Insightful And Poignant)

Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death, and the origin of human suffering. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her book The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.

Top 10 Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

1. The past is never where you think you left it.
2. 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.
3. You waste life when you waste good food.
4. 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.
5. Each generation must get on the same old merry-go-round, only disguised in a fresh coat of paint.
6. I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
7. It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
8. Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
9. Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
10. It is such a relief to be told the truth.

Katherine Anne Porter Short Quotes

• No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.
• It is a man's world, and you men can have it.
• The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.
• Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
• God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.
• Be respectful of words. They mean something.
• Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
• I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
• First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.
• who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story.

Katherine Anne Porter Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country;...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you. — 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

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

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

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

...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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't say, `I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,' but of course it does. — Katherine Anne Porter

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. — 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

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. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Katherine Anne Porter

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

I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance. — 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

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

A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself -- or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. — Katherine Anne Porter

What we need now is endless courage. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Death is loneliness in its purest form. — 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

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

I work whenever I'm let. — 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

Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death always leaves one singer to mourn. — 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

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

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

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

I always write a story in one sitting. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . 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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Katherine Anne Porter

1. Katherine Anne Porter taught us to be resilient and to never give up, no matter how difficult the circumstances. She overcame poverty and personal tragedy to become one of the most influential journalists of her time.
2. She also taught us to never be afraid to take risks and to stand up for what we believe in, even if it means going against the grain.
3. Finally, Porter showed us the importance of having a strong work ethic and to never stop striving for excellence in all that we do.