Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Katherine Anne Porter
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Thinking
Spent
Percent
Went
Head
Water
Energies
Energy
Ninety
Writing
Keeping
Think
Ten
More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Katherine Anne Porter
Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.
Katherine Anne Porter
Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money.
Katherine Anne Porter
There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I.
Katherine Anne Porter
we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
We are born knowing death.
Katherine Anne Porter
We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
Katherine Anne Porter
We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don't run from the others, we are fools.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
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
I can pray better when I'm comfortable.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
Katherine Anne Porter
You are right, none of us live enough, and sometimes I think it is because we mistake hurrah and hullabaloo for experience, we get a sock in the eye and think it is a broken heart.
Katherine Anne Porter
There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
