Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
1890 - 1980
Read Katherine Anne Porter biography
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The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's owneven
more, one's own, for that has been put in our
care and we are responsible for its well- being.
1962 Ship of Fools, pt.3. 
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More Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
Oh, poor Pearl Buck! She has no more bounce than a boiled potato.
Katherine Anne Porter— Quoted from the journals of GlenwayWestcott, in Robert Phelps andJerry Rosco (eds) Continuous Lessons (1990).
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 (1962) Pt. 3
Most peoplewon't realizethat writing isa craft.You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
Katherine Anne Porter— 1962 In the Saturday Review, 31 Mar.
The pimple on the face of American literature.
Katherine Anne Porter— OnTruman Capote. Quoted in Gerald Clarke Capote (1988).
The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.
Katherine Anne Porter— On the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in The Nation (31 August 1927)
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" (1939)
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— Ship of Fools (1962) Pt. 3
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— "Herr Freytag" in Ship of Fools (1962) Pt. 3
I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul.
Katherine Anne Porter— On her novel Ship of Fools (1962) in McCall's magazine (August 1965)
I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore.
Katherine Anne Porter— Statement at age 80 in The New York Times (3 April 1970)
I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
Katherine Anne Porter— Quoted in "Contexts" (1982) by Irena Klepfisz [1]
