176 Quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

Don’t sidestep suffering. You have to go through it to get where you’re going.

Most people won’t realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Death is loneliness in its purest form...

I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of 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 love to praise what I love, and I won’t for a minute believe that love is blind – indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.

The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything...

The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else’s life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.