Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

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.

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

In 1935 in Paris, living in that thin upper surface of comfort and joy and freedom in a limited way, I met this most touching and interesting person, Emma Goldman, sitting at a table reserved for her at the Select, where she could receive her friends and carry on her conversations and sociabilities over an occasional refreshing drink. She was half blind (although she was only sixty-six years old), wore heavy spectacles, a shawl, and carpet slippers. She lived in her past and her devotions, which seemed to her glorious and unarguably right in every purpose. She accepted the failure of that great dream as a matter of course. She finally came to admit sadly that the human race in its weakness demanded government and all government was evil because human nature was basically weak and weakness is evil. She was a wise, sweet old thing, grandmotherly, or like a great-aunt. I said to her, "It's a pity you had to spend your whole life in such unhappiness when you could have had such a nice life in a good government, with a home and children." She turned on me and said severely: "What have I just said? There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be." I closed my eyes and watched Nietzsche's skull nodding.

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers.

"Ah! poate că raiul însuşi nu este decât asta. Faptul că Wilibald Graf poate să nu-şi amintească deloc a fi fost Wilibald Graf, nenorocit pelerin pierdut pe această lume crâncenă. Poate că aceasta este semnificaţia binecuvântatelor cuvinte: "iertarea păcatelor!?

Schumann admitted, but only to himself that if hyenas were beautiful and could sing and dance, he would forgive them for being hyenas. But would they ever forgive him for being human?

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he's good for — 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. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for — to give his view of life.

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and James Joyce’s Dubliners.

[From Old Mortality]

The woman in the picture. . . was only a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times.

I don't want any promises, I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

I thought you said you’re a painter,” said Denny. “I am. Timekeeping in a mine was the way I made my living, so I could work,” said David. Denny thought this over a while, and then said: “Look, that’s something I can’t understand — you spend time working at something you can’t make a living at, and then you take a job so you can make enough money to go on working at the work you can’t live on — it gets me down,” he said. “And you call yourself a painter, but why aren’t you just as much a timekeeper in a mine? Why can’t you call yourself a timekeeper?” “Because I really am not one,” said David, “I just make my living that way, or did.… Now I’m going to try to make a living painting, but if I can’t, why, I can always get some kind of job, to keep me while I paint.

She wished to sit down quietly and wait for her death, but not until she had cut the throats of her man and that girl who were laughing and kissing under the cornstalks.

These beliefs were mainly Protestant but not yet petty middle-class puritanism: there remained still an element fairly high stepping and wide gestured in its personal conduct. The petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery, had not yet got altogether the upper hand in that part of the country - in fact, never did except in certain limited areas; but it was making a brave try.

The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet REvolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927- there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgement has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.

Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.