Top Katherine Anne Porter Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Katherine Anne Porter Biography

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.

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Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

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.

Artist, Giving, Human, Life, Together

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

Art, Cleared, Government, Literally, Meanings, Reality

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

Howling, Live, Want, Wilderness, World

Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.

Freedom, Liberty, Remember, Same

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.

Advice, Gifted, Needs, Tell, Young

Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing.

Defeat, Failure, Right, Thing, World

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

Men, World

One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex; or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.

Belonging, Defects, Lack, People, Sex, Views

Love must be learned again and again. . . Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Hate, Needs, Provoked, Waiting, Waits

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

Air, Art, Food, Giving Up, Real, Thing

You waste life when you waste good food.

Food, Good, Good Food, Life, Waste

Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.

Death, Draft, Learn, Mexican, Shadow, Shadows

Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else.

Artist, Cellars, Living, Praying, Think, Thinking

advance money is really a delusion, that is to say, I get no more until it is paid out in sales, but still, living from hand to mouth and day to day as I do, a nickel in the hand is more useful than the same nickel next year. What do I know about next year? I've never been there. I don't know any one who has.

Future, Hand, Hands, Money, Nickel, Years

words can never get at the truth.

Truth, Words

Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing. . . . And never take advice, including this.

Advice, Artist, Creative, Take, Way, Young

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.

Coherent, Converge, Ideas, Memories, Thousands, Writing

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination. . . the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

Creature, Human, Imagination, Important, Love Is

I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

Spent, Think, Thinking, Water, Writing

Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.

Imagination, Perception, Powers, Sense, Use, Writing

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