Katherine Anne Porter quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Katherine Anne Porter on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Death is loneliness in its purest form ...

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

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.

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

I can pray better when I'm comfortable,

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

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

Words can never get at the truth.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it ...

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

[From Old Mortality]
The woman in the picture ... was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.

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

You waste life when you waste good food.

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

Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing.

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

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

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

What we need now is endless courage.

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

We know that the Furies do not come uninvited.

The boys ate warily, trying not to be seen or heard, the cornbread sticking, the buttermilk gurgling, as it went down their gullets.

I always write a story in one sitting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

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

We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.

Be respectful of words. They mean something.

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

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

[From Pale Horse, Pale Rider]

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . .

The past is never where you think you left it.

I work whenever I'm let.

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

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

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.

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

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

What we need is endless courage.

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

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.

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination ... the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

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.

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

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

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

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

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

We are born knowing death.

Don't sidestep suffering. You have to go through it to get where you're going.