Quotes from Katherine Anne Porter

But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.

If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.

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

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.

The past is never where you think you left it.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

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

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.

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

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...

Don't you love being alive? asked Miranda. Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking? I love to swim, too. said Adam. So do I, said Miranda, we never did swim together.

You waste life when you waste good food.

Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.

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

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.

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.

People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...

The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it.

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'.

From Old Mortality ] The woman in the picture. . . was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh