It’s a man’s world, and you men can have it.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Men
Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Writing
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
Topics: Language
I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Despair
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
Topics: Despair
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Self-Discovery
Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Childhood
A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Style
Miracles are instantaneous; they cannot be summoned, but they come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Miracles
Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country; … but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
—Katherine Anne Porter
Topics: Experience, Truth
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
Topics: Legacy, Biography
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
Topics: Potential
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
Topics: Beauty
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
Topics: Order
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
Topics: The Artist
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Gail Sheehy American Writer, Journalist
- Bernard Malamud American Novelist
- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Journalist
- Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
- Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
- James Agee American Man of Letters
- Ernest Hemingway American Author
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