Katherine Anne Porter

we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.

— Katherine Anne Porter

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

— Katherine Anne Porter

words can never get at the truth.

— Katherine Anne Porter

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

— Katherine Anne Porter

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

— Katherine Anne Porter

You waste life when you waste good food.

— Katherine Anne Porter

I always write a story in one sitting.

— Katherine Anne Porter

What we need now is endless courage.

— Katherine Anne Porter

“Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner. “Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…”

— Katherine Anne Porter

Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.

— Katherine Anne Porter

“The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.

— Katherine Anne Porter

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.

— Katherine Anne Porter

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

— Katherine Anne Porter

I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.

— Katherine Anne Porter

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

— 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…

— 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…

— Katherine Anne Porter

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Nothing is mine, I have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine. Do I even…

— Katherine Anne Porter

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members…

— 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

There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a…

— Katherine Anne Porter

“People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you…

— 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…

— 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…

— Katherine Anne Porter

“...without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda,…

— 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…

— Katherine Anne Porter

[On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself.…

— Katherine Anne Porter

we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant…

— Katherine Anne Porter

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic…

— Katherine Anne Porter

Grant that the idea of God is the most splendid single act of the creative human imagination, and that all his multiple…

— Katherine Anne Porter

“Bells Screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in midair, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress;…

— Katherine Anne Porter

“At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what…

— Katherine Anne Porter

“Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their…

— 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…

— Katherine Anne Porter

I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a…

— Katherine Anne Porter