Katherine Anne Porter Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.”
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
“The past is never where you think you left it.”
-- 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 -
“You waste life when you waste good food.”
-- 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 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.”
-- 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 -
“I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.”
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
“The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.”
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
“Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather ...”
-- 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 -
“Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
“First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do ...”
-- 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 -
“Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 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 -
“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 -
“But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind ...”
-- 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
