Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, writer and novelist who went on to receive the highly esteemed Pulitzer Prize for her work ‘The Collected Stories’. She specialized in highlighting dark themes such as the origin of human evil, betrayal and death in her work. Porter’s thoughts were reflected in her notable works which include Ship of Fools, The Days Before, The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter and several posthumous works. Apart from the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, she went on to receive National Book Award, Gold Medal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and three nominations for Nobel Prize in Literature. As a tribute to honor her career and life, Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was erected in Brown County. Porter's writing was always rooted in realism and passion. We have collected some forthright quotes by Katherine Anne Porter, who never shied away from speaking her mind. Let us browse through some of the most popular quotes from this legendary novelist.
...with the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched...
[From Flowering Judas]
She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely 'a developed sense of reality'.
Katherine Anne Porter
[From Old Mortality]
The woman in the picture. . . was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.
Katherine Anne Porter
[From The Old Order]
The Grandmother always treated her animal friends as if they were human beings temporarily metamorphosed . . .
Katherine Anne Porter
[From Old Mortality]
...religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Katherine Anne Porter
Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner.
“Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…
She wished to sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.
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
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.
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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.
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
Katherine Anne Porter
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Katherine Anne Porter
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
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.
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.
