Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

What if her father and mother could not recognize her now if they saw her? In her flesh they slept serenely, loved and loving, not as remembered faces, nor in any arrested act or posture, but as her blood running softly in her veins, as the beat of her heart and the drawing of her breath.

Katherine Anne Porter
I think it is the most curious lack of judgment to publish before you are ready. If there are echoes of other people in your work, you're not ready. If anybody has to help you rewrite your story, you're not ready. A story should be a finished work before it is shown.

Katherine Anne Porter
Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water.... to follow it you very often have to give up something.

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
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
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
Let me be happy in your happiness, in which I believe most firmly.

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

Katherine Anne Porter
He was the worst kind of rich American, the kind who pretended to be poor.

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

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

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 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
They lie flat on their noses at first in what appears to be a drunken slumber, then flat on their backs kicking and screaming, demanding impossibilities in a foreign language.

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
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
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.

Katherine Anne Porter
Love without marriage can sometimes be very awkward for all concerned; but marriage without love simply removes that institution from the territory of the humanly admissible, to my mind. Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belonging. 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
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
Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather...

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
If it is not perfect, it is not love, and if it is not love, it is bound to be hate sooner of later. This is perhaps a not too exaggerated statement of the extreme position of Romantic Love, more especially in America, where we are all brought up on it, whether we know it or not

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 finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul.

Katherine Anne Porter