176 Quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don’t say, ‘I’m going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,’ but of course it does.

All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness; it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn. It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it...

You are right, none of us live enough, and sometimes I think it is because we mistake hurrah and hullabaloo for experience, we get a sock in the eye and think it is a broken heart...

I do not understand the world, but I watch it’s progress.

Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather...

We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.

People can’t hear anything except when it’s nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don’t mean it, or don’t know anything anyway, or it’s not true, or it’s against religion, or it’s not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...

Eventually women will learn there’s no such thing as freedom. Their husbands are just as fastened to the deck as they are. Men get onto a treadmill and never got off.

It’s a man’s world, and you men can have it.