Katherine Anne Porter

"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."

"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."

"Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never any of us are more than one-fourth fulfilled."

"Experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you."

"One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it."

"I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate."

"The past is never where you think you left it."

"Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with theintention to belong to, and share witheach other, a mystical estate; mysticalexactly in the sense that the realexperience cannot be communicated toothers, nor explained even to oneselfon rational grounds."

"It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history."

"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."