Katherine Anne Porter - Life Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

View all Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
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
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
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
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, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

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

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

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

Katherine Anne Porter
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he's good for — 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. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for — to give his view of life.

Katherine Anne Porter
It was no consolation to say their long ordeal was ended. It was not ended for us and — perhaps I should speak for myself — their memory was already turning to stone in my mind. In my whole life I have never felt such a weight of pure bitterness, helpless anger in utter defeat, outraged love and hope, as hung over us all in that room — or did we breathe it out of ourselves?

Katherine Anne Porter
All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate...

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
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
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
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
We've always had great letter writers, readers, great storytellers in our family. I've listened all my life to articulate people. They were all great storytellers, and every story had shape and meaning and point.

Katherine Anne Porter