Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You waste life when you waste good food.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Be respectful of words. They mean something.

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

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

I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a losing battle against my deepest inclinations, pulled myself out by the hair and went to Madrid...Madrid is a lovely enchanting city, and there was almost ready for me a kind of penthouse full of sunlight, a roof garden, and so on. I gave one look at it all, returned to the hotel and went to bed and wept bitterly for eleven hours...Why? Because I had seen Paris and could not endure the thought of being anywhere else.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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