Quotes from 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.

These beliefs were mainly Protestant but not yet petty middle-class puritanism: there remained still an element fairly high stepping and wide gestured in its personal conduct. The petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery, had not yet got altogether the upper hand in that part of the country - in fact, never did except in certain limited areas; but it was making a brave try.

T]he moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.

There must be a great many of them here who think as I do, and we dare not say a word to each other out of our desperation, we are speechless animals letting ourselves be destroyed, and why? Does anybody here believe the things we say to each other?

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

Ah! poate c? raiul însuÅŸi nu este decât asta. Faptul c? Wilibald Graf poate s? nu-ÅŸi aminteasc? deloc a fi fost Wilibald Graf, nenorocit pelerin pierdut pe aceast? lume crâncen?. Poate c? aceasta este semnificaÅ£ia binecuvântatelor cuvinte: "iertarea p?catelor!?

Schumann admitted, but only to himself that if hyenas were beautiful and could sing and dance, he would forgive them for being hyenas. But would they ever forgive him for being human?

Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

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.

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.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

Eventually women will learn there's no such thing as freedom. Their husbands are just as fastened to the deck as they are. Men get onto a treadmill and never got off.

Those who give the orders are not the ones to die The people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not all the same people.

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

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.

I work whenever I'm let.

What we need now is endless courage.

Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.

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.

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.