Katherine Anne Porter quotes - page 2
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
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
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
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
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