Katherine Anne Porter Quotes - Page 2

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.

Grant that the idea of God is the most splendid single act of the creative human imagination, and that all his multiple faces and attributes correspond to some need and satisfy some deep desire in mankind; still, for the Inquirers, it is impossible not to conclude that this mystical concept has been harnessed rudely to machinery of the most mundane sort, and has been made to serve the ends of an organization which, ruling under divine guidance, has ruled very little better, and in some respects, worse, than certain rather mediocre but frankly manmade systems of government.

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.

All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

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

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

There have been many times when I have been so entirely sickened of life it was very hard to work to keep on, a half dozen times I have been tempted to suicide, but I am glad I did not give way, for I have always felt that the last half of my life would somehow atone for the first half, and I still think it may ... It is not possible to live in this world without suffering unless one is a born stone. But it is also possible to have a great deal of happiness in spite of the suffering.

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.

I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness.

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

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.

who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story.

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

we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.

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

Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.

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.

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.

I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.

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

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

I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had - stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

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

We are born knowing death.