In the reckless phrase of the confirmed joiner in the fight for whatever relief oppressed humanity was fighting for, I had volunteered "to be useful … - Katherine Anne Porter

But I tell you, nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it’s his business to face it. He hasn’t got the right to sidestep it like that. 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. Surely, we understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.

An unbalanced savagely individualist people,” said Father Garza, “with their weird untraceable language and their pagan Catholicism … what would one expect? His name was Etchegaray,” he pronounced, rolling the word with sensuous pleasure.

[From The Old Order]

The Grandmother always treated her animal friends as if they were human beings temporarily metamorphosed . . .