Top 100 Katherine Anne Porter Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn’t trouble to write anything.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

52. “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

53. “There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

54. “Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

55. “Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

56. “I always knew one thing, that life is made bearable and possible and liveable by the relations of one human being to another, the individual love and gentleness between persons, or in any case, the unbreakable bond that grows and fastens lives together in all sorts of mysterious ways...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

57. “Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

58. “It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don’t do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

59. “I’m not afraid of life and I’m not afraid of death: Dying’s the bore.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

60. “No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

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

— Katherine Anne Porter

62. “I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

63. “I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

64. “We have this mistaken notion that everybody in the world has to go to college. The colleges are already crowded with people who never in this world will absorb more than a rudimentary education, and we dilute everything to meet this low standard.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

65. “Even St. Teresa said, “I can pray better when I’m comfortable,” and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don’t think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

66. “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

67. “I do not understand the world, but I watch it’s progress.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

68. “Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

69. “Evil is dull, that is the worst of it...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

70. “The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

71. “Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

72. “You are right, none of us live enough, and sometimes I think it is because we mistake hurrah and hullabaloo for experience, we get a sock in the eye and think it is a broken heart...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

73. “The place you are going towards doesn’t exist yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

74. “Eventually women will learn there’s no such thing as freedom. Their husbands are just as fastened to the deck as they are. Men get onto a treadmill and never got off.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

75. “There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity; and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

76. “Lazarus, come forth. Not unless you bring me my top hat and stick. Stay where you are then, you snob. Not at all. I’m coming forth.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

77. “All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

78. “We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

79. “I work whenever I’m let.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

80. “Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

81. “We are born knowing death.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

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

— Katherine Anne Porter

83. “I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

84. “First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

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

— Katherine Anne Porter

86. “Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?”

— Katherine Anne Porter

87. “The outright propagandist sets up in me such a fury of opposition I am not apt to care much whether he has got his facts straight or not. He is like someone standing on your toes between you and an open window, describing the view to you. All I ask of him to do is to open the window, stand out of the way, and let me look at the view for myself.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

88. “I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do – the really gifted don’t need advice and the others can’t take it.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

89. “I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

90. “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 the law as outside it.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

91. “Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean?”

— Katherine Anne Porter

92. “The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

93. “I always write a story in one sitting.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

94. “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

95. “Perhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

96. “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

97. “The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything...”

— Katherine Anne Porter

98. “I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can’t be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He’s thinking of what he’s trying to communicate.”

— Katherine Anne Porter

99. “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

100. “He really did look, Miranda thought, like a fine healthy apple this morning.”

— Katherine Anne Porter