Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

Katherine Anne Porter (18)

Birth:	15th May, 1890
Death:	18th September, 1980
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Journalist, Novelist, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 19th June

Births

• 1882 - Clarence Stein
• 1970 - Brian Welch
• 1972 - Brian Robert McBride
• 1903 - Lou Gehrig
• 1945 - Aung San Suu Kyi

Deaths

• 1956 - Thomas John Watson, Sr.
• 1939 - Grace Abbott
• 1886 - Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan
• 1820 - Joseph Banks
• 1953 - Ethel Rosenberg

• Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Topics in Death

• I don’t believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you’ve been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you’ve known it always.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Topics in Knowledge

  Tags in Intuition, Perception, Mind

• 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 in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write, Language

• Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

  Katherine Anne Porter

• 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

• 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

• One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.

  Katherine Anne Porter

• 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

• It is such a relief to be told the truth.

  Katherine Anne Porter

• I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have religious training. And I suppose you don’t say, “I’m going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal, but of course it does.

  Katherine Anne Porter

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

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Tags in Infidelity

• 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 in Life

  Tags in Sin

• 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

• Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Topics in Experience

• 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

• I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

  Katherine Anne Porter

• Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.

  Katherine Anne Porter

• 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