Katherine Anne Porter - Love Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
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.

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
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
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
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
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
Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.

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
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