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[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Days Before
Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themeselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, Ship of Fools
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Days Before
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.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, introduction, Flowering Judas
I was always restless, always a roving spirit. When I was a little child I was always running away. I never got very far, but they were always having to come and fetch me. Once when I was about six, my father came to get me somewhere I’d gone, and he told me later he’d asked me, "Why are you so restless? Why can’t you stay here with us?" and I said to him, "I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand."
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1963
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all the fidelities are undermined.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Days Before
Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Never-Ending Wrong
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Collected Essays
It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don’t do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1963
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own — even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, Ship of Fools
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.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"
The past is never where you think you left it.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, Ship of Fools
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.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, Letters of 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, The Collected Stories
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, "Marriage Is Belonging," Collected Essays and Occasional Writings
The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1963
Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Collected Stories
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.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1963
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, Collected Stories and Other Writings
There are many trials ... in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. 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, The Never-Ending Wrong
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.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1963
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