Katherine Anne Porter quotes - page 2

Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, and novelist best known for her short stories and her novel "Ship of Fools." Her works often explore themes of betrayal, death, and the human condition. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a significant figure in twentieth-century American literature. Here are 52 of her quotes:

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

Katherine Anne Porter

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Katherine Anne Porter

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist - the only thing he's good for - 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. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for - to give his view of life.

Katherine Anne Porter

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

Katherine Anne Porter

There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

Katherine Anne Porter

I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself.

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

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

Katherine Anne Porter

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

Katherine Anne Porter

At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

Katherine Anne Porter

She finally came to admit sadly that the human race in its weakness demanded government and all government was evil because human nature was basically weak and weakness is evil.

Katherine Anne Porter

The two of them joined together left me no answerable argument; their dream was a grand one but it was exactly that - a dream. They both lived to know this and I learned it from them, but it has not changed my love for them or my lifelong sympathy for the cause to which they devoted their lives - to ameliorate the anguish that human beings inflict on each other - the never-ending wrong, forever incurable.

Katherine Anne Porter

The State goes on without end in one form or another, built securely on the base of destruction. Nietzsche said: "The State is the coldest of all cold monsters," and the revolutions which destroy or weaken at least one monster bring to birth and growth another.

Katherine Anne Porter

For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.

Katherine Anne Porter

I was humiliated for them, for their apparent insensibility. But I was mistaken in my anxiety - their wish to help, to show her their concern, was real, their feelings were true and lasting, no matter how awkwardly expressed; their love and tenderness and wish to help were from the heart.

Katherine Anne Porter

I found myself on the side of the women; I resented the nasty things said about them by these self-appointed world reformers and I thought again, as I had more than once in Mexico, that yes, the world was a frightening enough place as it was, but think what a hell it would be if such people really got the power to do the things they planned.

Katherine Anne Porter

There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgment has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.

Katherine Anne Porter

They both spoke nobly at the end, they kept faith with their vows for each other. They left a great heritage of love, devotion, faith, and courage - all done with the sure intention that holy Anarchy should be glorified through their sacrifice and that the time would come that no human being should be humiliated or be made abject.

Katherine Anne Porter

Anarchy had been a word of fear in many countries for a long time, nowhere more so than in this one; nothing in that time, not even the word "Communism," struck such terror, anger, and hatred into the popular mind; and nobody seemed to understand exactly what Anarchy as a political idea meant any more than they understood Communism, which has muddied the waters to the point that it sometimes calls itself Socialism, at other times Democracy, or even in its present condition, the Republic.

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

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

A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself - or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

Katherine Anne Porter