Quote

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

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
Never
Learning
Expectation
Sure
Apparently
Evil
Virtuous
Government
Governments
Come
Cruelty
Cruelties
Done
Expected
Destroyer
Great
Committed
Appalling
Good
Expectations
Destroyers

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

Image
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
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
we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.
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
I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
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
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
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
The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
Katherine Anne Porter