A collection of Katherine Anne Porter quotes and sayings on art, belief, children, death, energy, evil, freedom, giving, writing etc.
34 Forthright Katherine Anne Porter Quotes Straight From Heart
Quick Facts
Famous As
Journalist, Essayist, Writer, Novelist
Born In
Indian Creek, Texas, U.S.
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.
The past is never where you think you left it.
- 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.
- Katherine Anne Porter
I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
- Katherine Anne Porter
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.
- Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter
God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
...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...
- Katherine Anne Porter![]()
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
- Pale Horse, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
You waste life when you waste good food.
- Flowering Judas, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
- Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
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![]()
[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'.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 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.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
[From The Old Order]
The Grandmother always treated her animal friends as if they were human beings temporarily metamorphosed . . .
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter
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[From Old Mortality]
...religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner.
“Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…
- Pale Horse, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
[From Pale Horse, Pale Rider]
The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . .
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
[From The Jilting of Granny Weatherall]
You waste life when you waste good food.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
The boys ate warily, trying not to be seen or heard, the cornbread sticking, the buttermilk gurgling, as it went down their gullets.
- Noon Wine, Katherine Anne Porter![]()
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.
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 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.
- Katherine Anne Porter![]()
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.
- Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
- Katherine Anne Porter![]()
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
- Katherine Anne Porter![]()
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
- Katherine Anne Porter![]()
Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.
- Katherine Anne Porter![]()
It is such a relief to be told the truth.
- 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
