Top 100 Katherine Anne Porter Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You waste life when you waste good food.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

2. “The past is never where you think you left it.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

3. “Don’t sidestep suffering. You have to go through it to get where you’re going.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

4. “Be respectful of words. They mean something.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

5. “What we need now is endless courage.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

6. “Nothing is mine, I have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine. Do I even walk about in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed to spare my modesty?”

— Katherine Anne Porter

7. “Death always leaves one singer to mourn.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

8. “I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

9. “Death is loneliness in its purest form...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

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

— Katherine Anne Porter

11. “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

12. “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 Anne Porter

13. “I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

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

— Katherine Anne Porter

15. “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

16. “I love to praise what I love, and I won’t for a minute believe that love is blind – indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

17. “But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

18. “Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

19. “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

20. “There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

21. “All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness; it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn. It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

22. “The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday – oh.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

23. “Each generation must get on the same old merry-go-round, only disguised in a fresh coat of paint.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

24. “The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

25. “I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

26. “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

27. “I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a 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

28. “Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

29. “You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

30. “Those who give the orders are not the ones to die The people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not all the same people.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

31. “The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

32. “I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

33. “Life comes first, an art not rooted in human experience is not worth a damn, but different kinds of minds have different kinds of experience, and all I ask of any man is validity; and there should be place for every type and kind of mind.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

34. “Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

35. “One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

36. “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

37. “It is such a relief to be told the truth.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

38. “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

39. “It’s a man’s world, and you men can have it.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

40. “Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

41. “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

42. “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

43. “There are so many things that 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

44. “I’ve been called a stylist until I really could tear my hair out. And I simply don’t believe in style. The style is you.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

45. “A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

46. “Most people won’t realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

47. “Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

48. “In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

49. “Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don’t be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can’t face that, better not write.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

50. “We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.”

— Katherine Anne Porter