Quote

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

Katherine Anne Porter

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
Essentials
Childhood
Children
Furnace
Good
Furnaces
Melted
Fiery
Shaped
Essential

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

Image
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.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I've been called a stylist until I really could tear my hair out. And I simply don't believe in style. The style is you.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Mexican writer and diplomat, Pasado en claro (A Draft of Shadows) You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I always write a story in one sitting.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't say, `I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,' but of course it does.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
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
Image
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?
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
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
Image
You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
Katherine Anne Porter