176 Quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.

But my belief is growing that our political and social evils are remediable, if only all of us who want a change for the better just get up and work for it, all the time, with as much knowledge and intelligence as we can muster for it. Half the wrongs of human life exist because of the inertia of people who simply will not use their energies in fighting for what they believe in. And finally the wrongs roll up into world catastrophes and millions of deaths and a terrible set-back for all mankind ...

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.

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination... the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing.

God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.

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.