Katherine Anne Porter > Quotes

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”
― 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. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of 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 Ann Porter

“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.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

“Death always leaves one singer to mourn.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

“The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet REvolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927- there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgement has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong

“...with the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched...”
― 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, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

“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. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.”
― Katherine Ann Porter

“Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools

“You waste life when you waste good food.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas

“The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of 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 road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

“People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools

“At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“It is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy- there is always the enemy!- into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that oratory when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong

“[From Flowering Judas]

She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely 'a developed sense of reality'.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

“But I tell you, nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it’s his business to face it. He hasn’t got the right to sidestep it like that. 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. Surely, we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.”
― Katherine Ann Porter, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

“The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations

“Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? No more sleep. Where are are my boots and what horse shall I ride? Fiddler or Graylie or Miss Lucy with the long nose and the wicked eye? How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

“Strolling, keeping step, his stout polished well-made boots setting themselves down firmly beside her thin-soled black suede, they put off as long as they could the end of their moment together, and kept up as well as they could their small talk that flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper suface of the brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old each, alive and on earth at the same moment: 'Are you in the mood for dancing, Miranda?' and 'I'm always in the mood for dancing, Adam!' but there were things in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

“[From Old Mortality]

The woman in the picture. . . was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

“Mrs. Treadwell moved away again, from the threat of human nearness, of feeling. If she stayed to listen, she knew she would weaken little by little, she would warm up in spite of herself, perhaps in the end identify herself with the other, take on his griefs and wrongs, and if it came to that, feel finally guilty as if she herself had caused them; yes, and he would believe it too, and blame her freely. It had happened too often, could she not learn at last? All of it was no good, neither for confidant nor listener. There was no cure, no comfort, tears change nothing and words can never get at the truth. No, don't tell me any more about yourself, I am not listening, you cannot force my attention. I don't want to know you, and I will not know you. Don't try to come nearer.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools

“The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools

“Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner.
“Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider