Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer;… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
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… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
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… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things,… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had -… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share
I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a losing battle against my deepest inclinations, pulled myself out by the hair and went to Madrid...Madrid is a lovely enchanting city, and there was almost ready for me a kind of penthouse full of sunlight, a roof garden,… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share
Your mind outwears all sorts of things you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken away. — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share
The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done… — Katherine Anne Porter Copy Share Image
