Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

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.

You waste life when you waste good food.

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.

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.

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.