Quote

I work whenever I'm let.

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
Whenever
Work

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

Image
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
Image
Perhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
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
You waste life when you waste good food.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
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
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 know that the Furies do not come uninvited.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
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
Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don't be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can't face that, better not write.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
It is such a relief to be told the truth.
Katherine Anne Porter
Image
Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
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
We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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
Image
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