Katherine Anne Porter
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Beauty
Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
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.
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
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.
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.
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.
It is such a relief to be told the truth.
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
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.Collection: Brave
The past is never where you think you left it.Collection: Past
If we say I love you, it may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe. Say I hate you, and the one spoken to believes it instantly, once for all. ... Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.Collection: Hate
Each generation must get on the same old merry-go-round, only disguised in a fresh coat of paint.Collection: Generations
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.Collection: Ideas
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 of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.Collection: Art
You shouldn't side-step suffering if you have to go through it to get where you're going.Collection: Suffering
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.Collection: Moments
Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Together
Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.Collection: Freedom
What we need now is endless courage.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Morning
First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.Collection: First Impression
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.Collection: Advice
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Thinking
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; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization!Collection: Country
Be respectful of words. They mean something.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Real
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.Collection: Beauty
Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.Collection: Love Is
I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore.Collection: Dying
No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.Collection: Men
I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled. In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Art
I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Mistake
And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in ... tiresome acrobatics. ... Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. ... When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.Collection: Believe
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.Collection: Fall
I can pray better when I'm comfortable.Collection: Praying
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.Collection: Death
Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.Collection: Artist
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?Collection: Beautiful
Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.Collection: Aunt