Katherine Anne Porter quotes

" Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing. " # Failure # Honor # Poverty and The Poor

" 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. " # Language # Intelligence and Intellectuals # Writers and Writing

" 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. " # Dissipation # Suffering # Spirit and Spirituality

" It is a man's world, and you men can have it. " # Men

" 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, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own. " # Order # Change # Love

" Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled. " # Potential # Love # Life and Living

" 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. " # Style # Faces # Love

" 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. " # Beauty # Sin # Responsibility

" I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that. " # Biography # History and Historians # Choice